The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (9 page)

England’s fascination with storms only grew as he got older. He looked forward to the spring with a mix of fear and anticipation. He was ten or eleven when he finally saw his first tornado, a funnel that magically appeared in the distance when he was riding the school bus home one spring afternoon. It dropped down in a field near the North Canadian River, which ran south of town. It wasn’t a big tornado, and it faded away quickly, but he was mesmerized. His dad had taken a job as a delivery driver for a bread company, and Gary occasionally joined him on the long routes around western Oklahoma. The truck didn’t have a radio, and his dad passed the time singing old country songs while Gary stared out the window at the sky, looking for signs of that next storm.

Television had arrived in Oklahoma by then, though England and his family were too poor to own a set. The first time he saw a television was through the front window of his uncle’s hardware store. A crowd had gathered around a brown box where he could see a faint picture of people who appeared to be caught in a snowstorm. The reception was poor—Seiling was more than 100 miles away from Oklahoma City, home of the state’s only television station at that point—but soon the picture became clearer as tall antennas began to rise on the landscape like metal weeds. He would walk by the hardware store as often as he could, staring into that storefront where the brown box gave him a glimpse of a world that seemed so far away.

By then Gary was old enough to begin to think of what his future might hold. He figured he’d probably be a pig farmer someday—he’d always liked pigs. But one fateful night he walked past the hardware store and saw something he’d never seen before: a man standing in front of a map of Oklahoma that was covered in chalk lines. He couldn’t hear what the man was saying, but crude lines on the map appeared to represent weather fronts, cold air and hot air, and they were converging right over Oklahoma. He watched as the man wrote numbers over different regions of the state. In one corner of the map he wrote, in all caps, “RAIN.” A day later it did rain, just as the man had predicted—and England was hooked.

 • • • 

Though England didn’t learn his identity until later, that man was Harry Volkman, the very first television weatherman in the state of Oklahoma and one of the first broadcast meteorologists in the entire country. A Boston native who was obsessed with the weather before he could even read, Volkman came to Oklahoma when he was discharged from the army after World War II. He enrolled at an aeronautical school in Tulsa, one of the few institutions at the time to offer a degree in meteorology. Forecasting back then was primarily viewed as a function of the military, but Volkman’s interest wasn’t just scientific. As a child he’d seen his mother petrified by the sudden appearance of thunderstorms, and he dreamed of being able to tell people what was coming so that they could be prepared and could perhaps even appreciate the weather around them. He was a precocious kid who even started his own amateur radio station at one point using his family’s roof antenna. In Tulsa he revived those skills and took a job as a disc jockey at a local radio station, where he begged the management to let him do the forecasts too. Finally they relented, and he began to do a nightly weather report.

Even in a place like Oklahoma, where the weather has such an impact on people’s lives, many of Volkman’s colleagues had no actual knowledge of its most basic science. A colleague who introduced him could barely pronounce his new title. On air the man called him the station’s “meaty-e-rologist.” In 1949 KOTV, Tulsa’s first television station, went on air, and Volkman pitched himself as a forecaster. The station’s staff dismissed him, telling him they weren’t even sure they would do weather. A few months later, after he’d taken a job working as a janitor and doing other odd jobs at KOTV, Volkman finally got his shot. He went on air with a plastic map of Oklahoma and illustrated his forecast by drawing over it with a grease pencil that could be wiped away after every show.

The U.S. Weather Bureau, which handled forecasting at the time, shared only broad sketches of what it thought the skies would do, and few people outside the military had access to weather radars. Volkman had learned Morse code in the army as part of a team that decoded weather updates sent between units to protect artillery. In Tulsa, and later in Oklahoma City, he used a shortwave radio to tap into those transmissions, listening to coded messages sent to and from nearby military bases with atmospheric observations and forecasts. He used them to craft his own forecasts.

In March 1952 Volkman moved to Oklahoma City and joined WKY-TV—or, as the locals knew it, Channel 4. (Decades later it would change its call letters to KFOR, as it is known today.) By then the Weather Bureau knew he’d been cracking military forecasts—but it didn’t stop him. In his first week on the job a potentially deadly outbreak of severe storms erupted, threatening Oklahoma City. With the skies growing ever more ominous, Volkman and his boss, Buddy Sugg, a former navy officer, heard transmissions over the radio that a “tornado alert”—the early version of a “tornado watch”—had been issued by forecasters at nearby Tinker Air Force Base. Officials there had started to take the weather seriously after two tornadoes hit the base within days of each other in 1947, almost wiping out its fleet of B-2 bombers, but though their forecasts were considered among the most accurate in the air force, they were kept secret from the public. Some were leaked to Volkman, who was still monitoring the coded messages, but he was limited in what he could do with the information. The FCC had actually banned radio and television broadcasters from using the words “tornado” or “tornado alert”—concerned that they could cause mass panic. Sugg would have none of it. He felt that to not alert the public was to needlessly put lives at risk. He told Volkman they absolutely had to get the alerts on the air. It was their duty. “We could get arrested,” Volkman said. “I’m giving you an order,” Sugg replied. “If they want to arrest anyone, let them arrest me.”

The station dispatched a reporter to Tinker with a hidden microphone, and on base he recorded audio of the tornado alert, which listed specific counties that were at risk. Back at the station Volkman interrupted programming and, in front of his crude map, warned viewers of the impending storm heading toward Oklahoma City. Though nothing touched the ground that day, it was the first televised tornado watch in history. Government officials were furious—they threatened to arrest him and strip the station of its broadcasting license. But in the end they did nothing because they knew they wouldn’t have the support of the public, who sent Volkman thank-you cards and kind notes. After that he kept issuing tornado warnings, including one for a 1954 twister that wiped out part of Meeker, east of Oklahoma City. A few months later, in early 1955, he was hired away by a relatively new rival station, KWTV. It was the opening salvo in a bitter and personal war spanning decades between Channel 9 and Channel 4 for weather supremacy in Oklahoma City.

 • • • 

England knew nothing of Volkman’s history or the important role he had played in the development of television meteorology. All he knew was that he was dazzled. The idea that someone could predict the weather blew his young mind. Amused by their son’s interest, his parents accommodated him by driving him over to his grandparents’ house every Sunday night. They were the first in the family to own a television set, and while the adults talked, Gary would park himself right at the foot of the television, inches away from the screen, listening intently. At the time, the pioneering weatherman was doing forecasts twice a day every day. He had his own Sunday-night program,
Weather Station,
which sometimes had the feel of a variety show. An accomplished vocalist in his church choir, Volkman occasionally sang a sentence or two when proclaiming the forecast, and as he talked about air fronts moving through the state, he would enact them with a big “
Whoooshhh
.” England loved it, and one night he turned to his father and excitedly declared that he wanted to be like Harry Volkman when he grew up. “Well, what is he?” his father replied. “I don’t know,” England said, “but I want to be one.”

 • • • 

While Volkman had started to change the way people thought about forecasting and public awareness, most universities around Oklahoma still didn’t offer meteorology degrees when England graduated from high school. Only the military had weather training, so he joined the navy and after a couple of years was able to take classes at its weather school based in New Jersey. It was there that he finally learned why Oklahoma’s weather was so volatile—what all those lines on Volkman’s crude weather map really meant. Until then he had believed that no one but God really knew what Oklahoma’s weather would do—and while in many ways that was still true, he finally understood that there was vital data available that suggested when and where storms would erupt—clues most Oklahomans knew nothing about.

After a stint in the Midway Islands, where he helped guide navy pilots through some of the wildest weather conditions on the planet, including massive tropical storms, England left the navy and went back to Oklahoma, where he got married and began taking classes at the University of Oklahoma. Decades later OU would offer one of the most celebrated meteorology programs in the country, but in the early 1960s it still didn’t offer a weather degree. He was forced to major in math, a subject he had barely studied in high school, with a meteorology “option.” His adviser was beyond skeptical, telling him he wouldn’t make it in meteorology, but “you can try.” All he wanted to do was be a TV weatherman. He had no idea how hard it would be to get there.

As he struggled through classes—made more difficult by his dyslexia, which wouldn’t be diagnosed until years later—he got a part-time job at the Atmospheric Research Lab on campus. Scientists were only just beginning to study the origins of tornadoes and what made them so deadly, and he was right there on the front lines. But he couldn’t give up on the idea of television, and he contacted David Grant, who had replaced Volkman at KWTV. Grant told him to make an audition tape. Suddenly England was terrified. In all his years of dreaming of being on television, he’d never practiced in front of a camera. But he did it, and then later he auditioned in person. When Grant called to offer him a gig doing the weather on the weekends, he astonished his wife by turning it down. He was too terrified of going on television.

Instead he and Mary moved to New Orleans, where he took a job forecasting weather and oceanographic conditions for a private meteorological firm whose primary client was the offshore oil industry. He spent a few years guiding clients through storms, including Hurricane Camille—one of the most destructive hurricanes to ever hit the Louisiana Gulf Coast until Katrina. But all that time he couldn’t stop thinking about the storms back in Oklahoma. In 1970, when he saw reports of a tornado that had hit parts of Oklahoma City without warning, he decided to go back, more confident in his abilities and convinced he could make a difference. But when he went home for interviews, none of the Oklahoma City television stations were interested. He had no on-air experience.

Dejected, he went to KTOK, the first radio station in Oklahoma to have its own weather radar. It was an old device, repurposed from a decommissioned airplane, but it was a radar nonetheless. The general manager told him they didn’t need a meteorologist. Their talk-show hosts and disc jockeys were more than capable of reading the radar, he said. England refused to give up. As spring approached, he spent almost every morning at the station, sitting in the lobby, where he drank free coffee and waited, convinced that they would need him. It was a gamble, but he had no other prospects. Finally one morning he heard someone running down the hall. Severe storms were erupting to the west of Oklahoma City, right in the middle of the early-morning rush hour. Nobody at the station knew what to do. “Can you read this radar?” the manager asked. When England nodded, the man yelled, “You’re hired! Now get back there and tell the audience what is happening with this storm!”

 • • • 

Those early months on the radio were a trying time for England. All the confidence he’d had when he was trying to get the job vanished when he found himself on air. His mouth went dry, his personality faded, and he struggled to do anything and everything. Through the glass of the studio, he could see his colleagues laughing every time he tried to pronounce the strange names of counties around Oklahoma he’d never even heard of: Pontotoc, Pottawatomie, Pushmataha. His office was the dusty attic of the old house west of downtown where KTOK’s studios were located, right next to the old radar, which wasn’t even strong enough to measure the weather immediately around it. He began to wonder if this would be both the beginning and the end of his illustrious career as a broadcast meteorologist.

 • • • 

Soon a disc jockey named Bob Riggins, the top-rated morning drive-time host in the city, took pity on him. One morning he pulled him aside and told him that being on the radio was about having fun, having a personality. England had no idea what he was talking about. Riggins shoved him in a room and told him to laugh. England produced something that, as he later recalled, sounded like a pervert making an obscene phone call. Riggins was incensed. “Laugh!” he screamed, and England was so startled that he fell backward. He began to laugh at the silliness of the situation. That, Riggins declared, was a real laugh, and he ordered him to practice it every day until he could do it on air so that it sounded natural.

The disc jockey gave England an on-air nickname—“the Wonderful Weather Wizard”—and told him he needed a shtick that could get him through the months when the weather wasn’t so bad. A few weeks earlier England had brought in a tiny green lizard that he’d captured at the lake, and some of the secretaries at the station had screamed at the sight of his miniscule new pet. Riggins told him that he thought he should make that lizard part of his weather reports—except it should be something more supernatural. “An 805-pound thunder lizard,” he suggested. And thus was born one of the stranger elements of England’s weather career—an imaginary giant lizard that changed colors with the weather and was so ugly that cows turned their head in shame. On air England began to casually mention his fictitious lizard at the tail end of his weather reports: “It’s partly cloudy skies, and good Lord, that ugly thunder lizard was spotted again near mile marker 107!” To England’s surprise, listeners began to call in, reporting their run-ins with a creature that was wholly made up—how they’d seen it scrambling down Interstate 35 in pursuit of a Coors truck or chasing horses in a field off Route 66. They were all in on the joke. It became one of the most popular segments on the radio and eventually part of the lore of Gary England.