Category talk:John Coleman (meteorologist)
I was a WBBM-TV assistant to the Production Department during the time that John Coleman started working there. He was hired to do the weather as a suitable replacement for PJ Hoff had not yet been found. Hoff had to retire due to age related issues and was a friend of mine as well as his daughter and they had an office just down the hall from mine. I had an easy job handling production issues and often visited the announcer's booth where, once every 15 or so minutes, the announcer on duty would say "WBBM-TV Chicago" during network programming breaks to satisfy the FCC requirements for identification of broadcasting companies across the US.
I remember, quite distinctly one afternoon when I dropped into the announcer's booth to see what was going on. It was a great place for find out all sorts of information about things going on in the Studios' as well as a nice game of poker or gin between the station ID's. On this particular day, I remember John was the only person in the booth and he asked me to sit down for awhile. It was apparent he was not happy and I asked him how he was doing. He replied that he had come to Chicago to be the head weatherman but had been delegated to announcing and because of this he was considering a change.
I left WBBM in April 1967 shortly after my father had passed away during the blizzard of '67. I remember John going over to ABC, WBKB-TV channel 7 and becoming the head meteorologist at that station. He always made his weather forecasts interesting and came up with his own clever names like Thorms for thunder storms that frequented Chicago and was very entertaining overall. To my knowledge he never worked for WMAQ-TV, the NBC affiliate in Chicago. There is also a photo showing, among others, Fahey Flynn and John Drury as working for WMAQ which is totally inaccurate as they both worked for the CBS WBBM-TV station. Bill Curtis, who went on to do many other things in broadcasting including his own specials also worked there during this time.
I read about John's death in Las Vegas this morning and was overwhelmed with visions of Chicago from the 60's, the people I knew and worked with and have left this place for, I hope, a better place. I had made some very good friends including Lester Ibanez who was in the art department where I spent a lot of time fooling around and killing time waiting for a baseball game to end so I could put the slides together showing the scores for the news department. That's how we did it back then. No fancy computers or gizmos. I left the business because of the low pay and went on to a career of many different avenues over the years. All I have left are the memories of my time in show business and the people that I admired so.
Burt Leibold — Preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.2.234.2 (talk) 19:23, 30 January 2018 (UTC)