Transcription of Faces of Maine Broadcasting #275
Announcer: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick, Maine. Show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Pat Callaghan: Anyway, we had to fill all this time, and it was hard because I never saw the video of the explosion at the time until that night. I saw what happened before my eyes, but it wasn’t until that night when I finally saw the videotape, I said, “My God, it’s so obvious what just happened,” you know, because the picture’s so close.
At that moment, let’s say, you rely on the homework you’ve done and the background that you have, and you can speak extemporaneously about it. You have to keep your emotions in check because nobody wants to hear you falling apart because it was shocking and sad and, you know, so unexpected.
Keith Carson: I think all of this lines up. What you experienced as a kid that awes you, I think is what sticks with you. In New England, it’s going to most likely be snow. For me, I’d say it’s snow, tropical weather, and then severe’s probably third, partially because I just didn’t deal with it very much. I did only at The Weather Channel when they sent me to Missouri or Oklahoma.
I also think the violent, destructive nature of that takes some of the fun out of it for me, if that makes any sense, you know. We had gotten a lot of tornado aftermath, and you understand what’s happening here to these people, so it makes it less interesting… I don’t know, to me, because you know what it can do.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show #275, Faces of Maine Broadcasting, airing for the first time on Sunday, December 25, 2016. We depend upon people we trust to give us the news of the day. Today, we speak with beloved broadcasters who keep us up to speed on what has happened and what is yet to come. Pat Callaghan started working at WCSH 6 News Center in December 1979. Meteorologist Keith Carson recently returned to WCSH 6 after taking a coveted position with the Weather Channel. Thank you for joining us.
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Dr. Lisa Belisle: My next guest is well known, really, to the Maine community. This is Pat Callaghan who started working at WCSH 6 News Center in December 1979. He is the co-anchor of the 5 pm, 6 pm and 11 pm shows and has been co-anchoring the 6 pm newscast with Cindy Williams for 27 years. Wow! You’ve been around for a long time.
Pat Callaghan: Wow, indeed. Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah.
Pat Callaghan: Time flies when you’re having fun.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: It does seem like you’ve had some fun. I can’t imagine spending as much time as you have doing what you’re doing if you didn’t enjoy it in some way.
Pat Callaghan: Oh, no, one of the great things about it is sometimes it’s not like working for a living. Lot of times it is. There’s always a routine that you get into, things that have to be done at a certain time, but it’s usually something different every day so, while you follow the same pattern or routine, there’s something else going on that… and you think you’ve seen it all, and you never have.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Now, you grew up not in Maine. You grew up in Framingham, outside Boston. Tell me a little bit about that early path. Did you know from the moment you jumped out of the womb that this is what you wanted to do?
Pat Callaghan: I didn’t know, but it’s not surprising that I would have been interested. My dad worked for a radio and television station first in western Massachusetts, then in Washington and then in Boston. That’s when I came along, and so it was always something that seemed like an interesting way to make a living to me. The other part of it was that we had three or four daily newspapers in the house, so when you’re a kid, you start out reading the newspaper and you read the comics. Then you read the sports pages. Then eventually you start reading the rest of the paper as well.
In those days in particular, when you had morning and evening editions of papers and a lot of competing papers in the city like Boston, plus the local Framingham paper, you got a lot of different opinions and takes on things. It teaches you to be a little open minded about ideas and figure out who’s right and who isn’t. I was always interested in the news, and we would watch the newscast. My dad was anchoring sports for a while at the time when the Red Sox were having their impossible dream, almost 50 years ago now, in 1967, and that was very exciting for a kid who was about 11 years old. That’s just the right time. Watching him do that was pretty interesting.
Occasionally, we’d go in to the station with him. At the time, they were located in Kenmore Square in Boston, just two blocks away from Fenway Park. If we’d go to a ballgame, we might have to stop by the station for something and seeing all the technology stuff and also they had kids’ shows in those days. “Major Mudd” was one of them, and they had this science fiction thing called “Fantasmic Features.” The host was a guy named Feep. When you saw the big Feep head on a stand, it was like, “Ooh, I know that.”
Anyway, so it always seemed kind of glamorous and interesting. In college, I went to the University of New Hampshire and worked for the radio station there, mostly as a disc jockey, and I loved that because you can play what you want when it’s college radio and really express yourself. I also started doing news. I didn’t really study broadcasting as such or communications. I studied English and history, so I’ve always thought that that is a good background for anybody in this line of work because you know a little bit about a lot of things, and it teaches you how to ask questions and how to seek out information and research things.
The TV part of it or the radio part, the broadcasting, that’s easier to learn than the rest of it. You have to be able to write quickly on deadline and have it come out making sense without laboring over it sometimes. It’s a good background for that. Just to conclude that story, which went on forever, when I graduated, I had several part time jobs. One was writing for the nightly newscast they used to do in New Hampshire Public Television which was almost like going to grad school, which I considered doing, but now I’m with people who are out reporting the news in a place where there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on because of politics, which I’ve always loved.
I got to follow the governor’s race that year and it was really interesting to see how it’s done and just the whole mechanics of it all. Occasionally, they’d let me get on the air to fill in or something, and that was it. I was able to put together a tape with some demonstration stuff and when I was looking for a full time job, I wound up in Bangor, WLBZ. I had applied here in Portland and they said, “Well, you’re not quite ready for this yet, but we’ve got another station, and we think you could use some seasoning up there.” They were absolutely right, so that’s where it began.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: From what I understand, Bill Green helped you out for a little bit of the time when you were in Bangor.
Pat Callaghan: He did. Bill was working at LBZ then. He’s a Bangor native, so he really knew his way around. He’s very friendly, very open. He didn’t really know me at all and the first day I was there, he said, “Hey, if you need to use my apartment to make phone calls looking for a place to live …” No, so Bill is the oldest friend I have in Maine and it’s a pleasure that we’re still working together after all this time. You have this sort of shared heritage, if you will, that we’ve seen a lot of things come and go over the years, and we’ll make jokes about something that some of the younger people have no idea what we’re talking about. Just a couple of old fools, but, you know, it’s been very nice.
The other great thing, Don Carrigan worked at WLBZ at the time, too. I remember when I first walked in I saw this reporter, he had a full beard at the time, which I thought was unusual for a television station. I think the reason he had it was he was appearing in a play, he was probably doing “Fiddler on the Roof” or something, because Don does a lot of community theater and still does. You quickly learn, this is a guy who knows his way around, and you can learn a lot from him, and I have. I still feel like I’m learning from him now.
In those days, I was hired to produce and anchor the 11 o’clock newscast as well as report. I covered City Hall, all the City Council meetings and so forth. You had to learn how to do a lot of things. We were shooting 16 mm film back then and there were no computers or word processors. Everything was done on typewriters, and you had to type your scripts with carbon paper, so you had multiple copies.
To put the newscast together, you have to assemble a big film reel with each clip of film that you’re going to use and make sure they’re in the right order. If you have to drop something for time reasons, you can’t just throw the tape aside or anything. You’ve got to now spool through that piece of film. It seems outrageous. You wonder how you got it done, but you do. All of it was part of a great learning experience because you’re involved in every aspect of producing and reporting.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Do you think that there’s something that’s missing now, that people don’t have to go through this whole process, or does it not really …
Pat Callaghan: No, there’s a different kind of multitasking they have to do now. There’s a lot more reporters in our shop and others, too, who have to work on their own, what they call multimedia journalists, or multi-skilled journalists. They always come up with some thing you can initialize, but really what it means is that they shoot and write and edit all of their own stuff. In some cases, that can be good. I’ve always thought it’s better to have two people to work on the story together because you have someone to bounce ideas off of. Especially when you’re starting out, you know, it’s nice to have somebody who sort of knows their way around.
In Bangor, for example, it was really helpful… The head photographer there is a guy named Paul Salisbury, a good friend of mine who just passed away a few months ago, but he was from Southwest Harbor area, so he really spoke the language, and I didn’t. I would have looked silly or sounded like someone who didn’t know what in the world he was talking about to go down there and talk to people if you’ve got to do a story on some fishing thing. To have somebody who really knows it and knows how to break the ice and get people feeling comfortable was incredibly valuable.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Having done this for as many years as you have, I’m guessing that you have a fair sense of what’s going on in the state and you have a fair number of contacts.
Pat Callaghan: Yeah, I mean I certainly, in the political world, I’ve covered a lot of these people for a long time. I’ve covered five governors and six US Senators over the years which doesn’t seem like a lot, but the people in Maine, in the Senate in particular, tend to stick around awhile. I know many of the legislators. I don’t get to the state House as much as I used to, which I always really enjoyed. I liked the vibe up there. I know a lot of those people, and I like to think that maybe the more valuable thing is not just the contacts, but that people know who you are, and they have a sense that they can trust you to treat them fairly and get the story right. If you screw something up, you’ll tell them and apologize and move on.
You know, that’s what I like to think, that because we have people like myself and Don and Bill, and a lot of our younger reporters, too, but we have a certain level of trust that people know what to expect from us. Now, not everybody loves the media, but I think they know they’re going to get a fair shake from us.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: It sounds like the relationship that you have with people, it’s something that is strengthened over time and can actually lead to a more valuable outcome.
Pat Callaghan: Yeah, I think that works well for what we’re trying to do for people in Maine. When you think about it, having a television station is a public trust. You’re granted the right to use the public airwaves to make money, but you owe something back, and the way that’s been paid back, traditionally, is through public service programming and news.
The fact that we do so many newscasts, and we even have the magazine show, 207, which is unique in the state, and a lot of places don’t have anything like that, so we have an outlet for Mainers to express themselves, whether it’s in a news sense or whether it’s in an artistic, a musical or theatrical sense, there’s a place for all of that. That’s really… It’s our pleasure to be able to provide that public service, to give something to the people of Maine.
I know you mentioned you’d talked with Keith Carson. Well, weather is a huge part of that. Whenever you do research and ask people what’s important to them, severe weather coverage is number one because it’s Maine, and they want to know what’s going on. That’s why we spend so much time finding the right people and making sure they have the tools they need. It’s all part of what we owe the public.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I remember WCSH before there was Storm Center. I actually remember when it started and now you are….
Pat Callaghan: You can’t be that old.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I am that old, actually, yes, but I remember how it became, like, a thing, and I remember at the time… I was relatively young and I was like, “Really, we have to make this a thing?” but over time it’s kind of like got this excitement behind it, like, “It’s Storm Center. We’re taking this really seriously.”
Pat Callaghan: Yeah, those of us who were working there thought it was a bit much, too, and it occasionally still can seem like overkill from our point of view, but when I was growing up, and maybe you remember part of this, too, cancellations were done on the radio. If it was snowing, you’d get up and you’d turn the radio on to hear if your school was cancelled, and that seemed like a radio thing, not a TV thing, but our bosses at the time recognized that, “no, we could do this, too.” Thankfully, we reached the point where we didn’t have to read this stuff, that it can all be done with on-screen graphics. We kind of paved the way for TV stations to do that. Everybody does it now and has for some time, but I really think we were the first ones to break it out and make it a separate thing.
When you hear that music, everybody knows, “All right, time to pay attention.” It’s actually kind of funny because when the stations were owned by the Thompson family for many years, since their founding back in the 1920s as radio stations. When they were sold to Gannett, which is now TEGNA, when corporate ownership took over, they have a little different idea. They want music packages in every market to sound the same: “These are the things you can use,” but they did give us the exception that we can still use the Storm Center music because we convinced them, “This is important. This is how we identify this particular part of the newscast.”
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Which is so true because I’m actually like replaying it in my mind even now as you’re talking.
Pat Callaghan: Yeah, it’s an ear-worm now, and I’ve cursed you with it.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah, thank you so much for that. You could sing it. Would you like to sing it for me?
Pat Callaghan: I wouldn’t but, you know, we had one of our meteorologists, Cliff Michaelson years ago, was a pretty good fiddle player, and he would play that sometimes on the air on his violin. Caroline Cornish, I’m sure, could learn it, too, because she plays violin, too. There’s nothing like hearing the Storm Center theme on violin, but I can’t do that.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Okay. Well, maybe we’ll sneak around like next time the storm comes up….
Pat Callaghan: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: We’ll see if we can catch you unawares or something, let’s see if we can get you to do it in a weak moment. I’m interested in the news these days because I also came from a time… I used to deliver both the paper, you know, when there was The Portland Press Herald and it was The Evening Express….
Pat Callaghan: Right.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: And the Sunday Telegram, and this was really how we got our news. There was radio and there was the paper and there was television. Now, the news is everywhere all the time which is great, and it’s been sort of democratized, but I also wonder if there’s a lack of curation. There’s a lack of, it seems like… It seems like maybe we don’t have the same amount of reflection on what’s going on.
Pat Callaghan: Yeah, I think some of that comes from the idea that people can now just, if they choose, listen to something that reflects the point of view they already hold, something that reinforces what they believe in, and it started with cable channels that skewed one political leaning or another. It continues with social media through Facebook or Twitter, or what have you. Your newsfeed on Facebook sort of is tailored toward the things you’re interested in, and there’s nothing wrong with that except, really what you’d need to do is have a broader palette to find information.
You know, say if you’re someone who’s liberal who only watches MSNBC, you kind of owe it to yourself to spend a couple hours a week watching Fox News just to hear what they’re talking about. Get some sense of where are they coming from; why do I disagree with that? Defend your… you know, internally, if you will, but you can convince yourself, “All right, maybe I was wrong,” or “No, I’m more convinced than ever that I was right.” It’s true, if you’re only getting it through social media, we try to have a… we have a presence there, of course. It’s never quite the same as when it’s put together in a newspaper or in a newscast.
Many would disagree because they think the, as you call it, the democratization of it is a good thing in that we don’t have to just rely on the so-called mainstream media, but mainstream media, at least the way we do it, is something that we feel you can trust to be fair and reliable, that it’s researched, that you don’t just say something and have it unchecked. Everything is vetted that gets on the air. There’s value in that.
The other problem with social media, and it has hurt a lot of media companies, newspapers in particular, is people have developed an idea that news should be free. Free is nice, but professional journalists who know how to do this craft need to be paid or they can’t do it. If you don’t subscribe to a newspaper, you’re kind of letting down the community in my eyes. You need to support journalism, even if it’s a paper you don’t always agree with in their editorial slant. People say, “Well, television is free,” so it’s, “Well, it isn’t really. We have commercials.” That’s how we pay the bills. The deal is, you sit and watch that half hour and you see the sponsor messages, and everybody gets something out of it. If you’re only getting it from social media, I think you’re kind of selling yourself short.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Why do you think we’ve come to this place where we believe that well researched, well written, well… I don’t want to say performed. It’s not performed, but well spoken….
Pat Callaghan: Presented.
Dr. Lisa B.: Presented, yes, information is somehow not worthy of getting support?
Pat Callaghan: I think it might be generational. You know, as younger people have gotten accustomed to using social media for so many things, they don’t really see the distinction. That can be a dangerous thing, if you just believe anything that gets tweeted out without some kind of background check or some kind of verification, you may wind up with some ideas that aren’t quite right.
That’s that whole debate that’s going on right now after the presidential election of what’s fake news and what isn’t. This idea that facts don’t matter is sort of frightening because facts are facts. If you quote somebody saying something, you’re not somehow attacking them. You’re just saying, “Well, this is what this person has said before. Now they’re saying this. Those things don’t match up. It’s worth pointing that out.” That’d take smarter people than I to figure out how you solve that.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I also wonder about the lack of pause where something is happening, but when something’s happening, you can’t necessarily make a good judgment. You can’t necessarily get the background on it; you can’t know what the long term implications…. If you put the news out there as it’s happening and that becomes the report of it….
Pat Callaghan: Without perspective.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Without perspective. Exactly.
Pat Callaghan: Well, it is and that’s been changing for a long time. It used to be, you know, back in the 60s, for example, you had one newscast in the evening. You had the 6 and then the 11 o’clock. Reporters working on the 6 o’clock news had all day to gather their information, call sources, check out what they had, and put the story together in a thoughtful way. Then you would start adding more newscasts. The deadlines start coming earlier. They come at 5:30, and then they come at 5 o’clock.
Now deadlines are constant. You’re supposed to be posting to the web or social media right away. When you’re covering a story, they want you putting out photos or maybe little videos as it’s happening, and again, the immediacy is good. It gets people interested in the story but, as you point out, if it’s done without much consideration of the bigger picture or what it all really means, I’m not sure any of us gain from that.
However, that’s technology, and it’s brought us to this point today and we have to learn to make the best of it and be careful not to rush just to try to be first, to try to be right first. When the TV producer, Grant Tinker, died last week, in his obituary they talked about one of his mottos when he started running NBC and their entertainment division was, “First, be best. Then be number one.” Or, “Then be first.” That can apply to us as well. You’ve got to remind yourself, and I have to remind myself, too, I’ve failed at this as well, there are times when you rush to get something out first and it’s not quite right or not what you believed it was, or just flat out wrong.
When it does, then you apologize and you try to fix it, and you move on. That’s at least one thing that the so-called mainstream media does that perhaps others, the fake news, will not do, is that if we get it wrong, we’ll admit we got it wrong, and we’ll try to make it right as fast as we can. Sometimes others will not do that.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: You are one of the few reporters in the country on air live from the Kennedy Space Center when the space shuttle Challenger was destroyed. Now, I remember this. I was in Geometry class in high school, and it was a big deal back then. I wasn’t there, I just heard about it from my teacher who was devastated. I suspect we all know where we were at that time.
Pat Callaghan: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: You were there, though.
Pat Callaghan: I was. It’s interesting how that came about, too, because in Framingham where I grew up, I knew the Corrigan family. They went to the same church we did, and so our families… I didn’t know them well, but I knew them enough and my dad was friends with Christa McAuliffe’s dad; her maiden name was Corrigan. I kind of had that little bit of an advantage when I told the news director at the time when she was chosen, Christa McAuliffe, the teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, chosen to be the first teacher in space. I said, “Gee, I really think we should cover this live. It’s local enough, New Hampshire is right there.” I might have oversold the connection that I had to the family, but not by much. I said, “Ah, yeah, really, this is going to be a great story,” and he bought into it and said, “Yeah, we should go cover that.”
The launch was delayed several times for various technical reasons. It was also very cold there. In fact, some of the Florida reporters blamed those of us coming from New England for bringing the cold with us. We really weren’t prepared for that, we hadn’t brought winter gear or anything. You’d go to a Sears down there and try to buy some winter gloves. They don’t have them. While we were covering the launch… Excuse me. There was a press grandstand, and there was a VIP grandstand.
The photographer I was with was down by the VIP section shooting video. There was in the “Teacher in Space” Program, if you’ll recall, there were two teachers chosen from every state to be the finalists, and one of the teachers from Maine was making the trip to watch the launch, a guy named Gordon Corbett from Yarmouth.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Who was also my teacher.
Pat Callaghan: Oh, well, there you go, so then you know exactly what I’m talking about. Gordon was there, and as part of the story, we wanted to see his reaction to the flight, everyone of course expecting it’s going to be jubilance, it’s going to be great. This was the big payoff at last. When the launch happened, and when the explosion happened, for those of us who’d never seen one of these things in person, it looked wrong but you figure, “Well, maybe that’s what it looks like in person. I don’t know.” Then, when it got so quiet, you weren’t hearing the chatter on the radio anymore, it’s suddenly, “Okay, there’s really a problem here.”
What your hope was, that we’d seen all the briefings about ways they could have a return to launch site abort, you know, if something was going wrong they could separate the orbiter and land. You’re hoping, “Well, gee, we hope that’s what it is,” but I was sitting near another reporter, a guy from Florida Today newspaper who actually lives in Maine again. His name is Chet Lunner, and he said, I could see, I was sitting right next to him, and he said, “This is bad. This is…” Because we were on the air live, I was actually on the phone. We were showing the pictures from the NASA Select satellite, but I was on the telephone, and we had Patsy Wiggins in the studio sort of anchoring the coverage.
You had to be careful not to say what you didn’t know. You needed to say something, but you can’t say, “Oh, crap, they’re going to be dead,” because you didn’t know that, but in the back of your mind you figure, “It doesn’t seem… Everything we’ve heard about what this really means is there is no real escape from this.” You start calling on your background knowledge. This is where homework comes in. I knew a lot about the space program, of course having grown up while it was the big moon shot race and everything, and I remembered Apollo 13. This is before the movie was made or anything, but I remembered all of that, was able to talk a little about, “Well, there have been accidents before, and they’ve been able to improvise and survive it.”
You end up filling time. We were on the air off and on… NBC hadn’t cut in yet because they weren’t covering it live. The space shuttle program had gotten so routine the networks weren’t covering it. I think CNN was because that was their job, and the station in Manchester was because it was a New Hampshire story. I think channel 13 might have been as well because they had a reporter there. Anyway, we had to fill all this time, and it was hard because I never saw the video of the explosion at the time, until that night. I saw what happened before my eyes, but it wasn’t until that night when I finally saw the videotape, I said, “My God, it’s so obvious what just happened,” because the picture’s so close, but at that moment let’s say you rely on the homework you’ve done and the background that you have, and you can speak extemporaneously about it.
You have to keep your emotions in check because nobody wants to hear you falling apart. It was shocking and sad and so unexpected. You don’t really think about that till you’re done with the job for the day. That carries through into anything you cover, really. There are times when the news is so tragically sad. You know, little kids with cancer, or whatever it is, and you can’t get so wrapped up in it that you’re falling apart. Really, people are looking for someone to tell us about it and kind of keep a cool head, so that’s what I try to do.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Do you ever thing of yourself as being an important part of people’s daily lives? Do you ever think of yourself as, “Oh, I’m sitting down to dinner with people and, you know, I’m one of the last things they see before they go to sleep, or….”
Pat Callaghan: That sort of thing occurs to you when you meet them, and they’ll tell you, like we just recently did the annual Coats for Kids drive. We all go out to the various locations, the supermarkets where we collect the coats and the toys. That’s a chance to meet a lot of people. I mean, they know you’re going to be there so they come by and you chat with them, and so, “Oh, we watch you all the time. We’ve been seeing you for so many years.” That’s when you think about it.
If you spent every day walking around thinking about that, it would be pretty ridiculous. You’d get a big head for no reason. When I introduce myself to people, they sometimes will say, “Oh, we know who you are.” Well, I assume nothing, take nothing for granted because not everybody does, and you kind of have to look at it that way. If you, as I say, if you walked around all the time thinking how important you are, that’s not a good way to live your life.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, I appreciate your taking the time to switch back to your radio presence, to your radio persona in coming in and having a conversation with me today. I’ve been speaking with Pat Callaghan who started working at WCSH 6 News Center in December of 1979. Certainly your station has been a part of my growing up in the state of Maine, so I thank you for all the work that you do, and I appreciate your being here.
Pat Callaghan: I thank you and everybody else for caring and keeping us employed.
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Dr. Lisa Belisle: Today I get to do something I have always wanted to do, which is to interview someone who does something really interesting on the air with weather. This is Keith Carson, and with 10 years of media experience, meteorologist Keith Carson has covered everything from tornado aftermath in Oklahoma to blizzards in Chicago.
A native New Englander, Keith leveraged social media and on-air presentation to reach the Weather Channel at the age of 30; now he has returned to WCSH TV in Portland where he is spearheading a new level of online and live reporting presence for the top rated local news station. Welcome back to Maine.
Keith Carson: Well, thank you. Great time of year to come.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah, it’s beautiful. You’re a Massachusetts native originally?
Keith Carson: Right, so I spent most of my life living in New England one way or another, from Massachusetts. Went to school in Vermont and then took a job in Vermont as well. I had this cold weather experience most of my life.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I’m interested in why one decides to study the weather. I’m sure this is not the first time you’ve been asked this question.
Keith Carson: No, and you know I think for most people that you ask this question, not just on-air meteorologists, a lot of meteorologists behind the scenes, it starts at a young age. For me it was the Blizzard of 1993. I was 10, so if you’re good at math you can quickly figure out how old I am, but that was the thing for me; it was a huge super storm all the way from Georgia up into New England. It was a big snow storm here.
I just remember standing in the driveway and just, I don’t know, being obsessed with the level of snow we were getting, and then it rolled from there. My parents saw this, so they’d bring me into TV stations to get the tours, I spent some time on Mount Washington in high school as a volunteer, so they were very supportive of the idea, “Do something you like,” and it never stopped being what I liked. That’s kind of how I ended up studying it.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: What is the educational background of someone who is a meteorologist?
Keith Carson: Well, it’s a four year degree. It’s mainly physics and calculus. That’s the base of it, so for the first two years of most meteorology programs you’re doing just… if you wanted to switch and be an engineer your junior year, it’s not a huge departure. It’s that kind of stuff. Then you get into the actual forecasting classes, usually junior and senior year, so because of that, a lot of people go in, they love the weather, and they drop out of meteorology because they don’t realize how heavy it is on this kind of stuff.
I believe my class at Lyndon State, which was in Vermont, there was a 60-something attrition rate, 60%, because people just didn’t like how they had to get to the degree.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Right, that makes sense. When you decided to go to college for meteorology, were you certain that this was your path, were you certain that you wanted to this and do it on-air or was this something that you thought, “Well, I like science, I like the weather, let’s see how it goes?”
Keith Carson: I was hoping it was because I was actually someone who naturally is better at the verbal side of things. For example, when I was going to look at colleges, my SATs were much better in verbal than math, so I was kind of going into a weak zone for myself. I knew I wanted to do weather; I think everybody at a young age looks at the TV side, and that’s all they know about.
I was open to other paths; in fact for two years I did behind the scenes forecasting, but I think at the end of the day, yeah. I mean, that was the only thing that got me through classes like Thermodynamics was the idea that I really wanted to do this, because there were easier majors that I could’ve delved into, and I just never did that.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: That’s similar to me with medical school and having to make it through things like calculus, which was definitely not my strong suit, but all doctors have to have some level of calculus and physics, actually. You have to have your eyes on the prize and keep moving forward because otherwise you get could get really bogged down and I guess questioning yourself and the direction you’re taking.
Keith Carson: Usually things that you want to do aren’t easy, and you know, physics, I don’t know what your experience was; I enjoyed the first probably course and a half of physics because of the theory behind a lot of it, and then it gets into the weeds after that. I think the last one I had to do was Physics 4, and I remember just being like, “You know what? I’m just going to get by. I’m not sure I entirely understand everything that’s happening here,” but the idea of meteorology is that they’re giving you the background for what the computer models are doing, a super computer; it’s to try to give you an understanding of it.
Like a lot of things in college, do I have to do those physics in a real world setting? Not really, but the idea is you have some sort of background there.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah, and I think that’s actually what happened with medical school; there’s a lot of stuff that I have never ever used again. I could probably go back and figure it out if I went way back in my memory banks, but I just don’t really need it. If you didn’t have it, you wouldn’t have the vocabulary around what you’re doing.
Keith Carson: Right, yep.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: You went up to Vermont, and you’ve been here in Maine, but you also spent some time down in Atlanta.
Keith Carson: Mm-hmm. What happened there was, I was pretty happy here at Channel 6 in Portland, and I had been there three years. We work under contract most people on TV, so you know, in my case it was a two year contract and then I signed a one year extension, so we’re coming up to the end of that, and I’m trying to decide what to do.
Now part of me, you’re always looking because you don’t know what the station’s going to do anyways. I had a pretty good idea that they were going to retain me, but at the time Joe Cupo was still there, Kevin Mannix was still there. Here are two guys that have been here forever. I just looked and said, “I might stay on weekend mornings for a long time. Lifestyle wise, I’m not sure that’s for me.”
I started to poke around, but I was pretty set on the idea of coming back to channel 6, or I was going to stay at channel 6, and then I got this email out of the blue from the president of the Weather Channel. I still remember because it was a specific day, it was Valentine’s Day, and it was extremely casual. It just said, “Hey, this is David Clark, president of the Weather Channel. I’ve seen your stuff, I’d like to talk to you.”
My first reaction was, my friends were just being jerks. I was like, “Can you fake a weather.com email address? Is that something you can do?” Long story short, I went back to Channel 6, we talked, and the basic feeling around the office including the general manager was, “Hey, we’ll do what we can to keep you, but we really think you probably should take this anyway.”
It’s the equivalent of if a reporter gets a call from CNN; you go to the Weather Channel and do that whole thing, so we moved south for three years.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, contrast the two jobs for me. What was it like to be, say, at WCSH and then at the Weather Channel? What was that like?
Keith Carson: Well, in local, I’d do the forecast, I make the graphics, I get up and present it. Usually you have three to four minutes. At the Weather Channel, they have other people doing the forecasts, they have this whole group of scientists that does it, they push it to the app that everybody has, it all goes to the same place to make sure it’s uniform. They don’t want people on TV giving you a different forecast than their app says.
Same data set, so I don’t forecast anymore. I don’t make the graphics anymore either. We have about 15 people who, their job is to make really good looking weather graphics. Essentially, I became a host. I’d come in with professional makeup, which is unusual in most markets; you go in, you read some scripts that have been written, and you still do the weather, but it’s not yours.
I had to learn how to become a host, which was new. I’d never read teleprompter, I never really interviewed people, so if you were to watch the first couple of months of tape, it was probably not great because I didn’t know how to interview people, and we were interviewing sometimes fairly big people. I remember we had Drew Brees on one time and I’m like, “Am I the guy that really should be interviewing this person? I don’t know what I’m doing,” but I learned.
I became a better host, but as far as the control, like the weather person in me, it’s a little hard to have somebody else, and they’re very good somebody elses, do the forecast. You lose some control over that whole aspect.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Then, when you decided to come back to Portland, you’ve only been back for a few months, is that right?
Keith Carson: Right. Yeah, so what happened there was basically, I knew the news director from last time. We started, in today’s day and age, very formal texting about, “Hey, is there a possibility that I could come back?” and I was weighing other options. Some of them had us moving to California; we were probably going to move because we felt like long term, that job wasn’t for me, as great as the people were and I was happy to have them try to retain me, but I just felt like it wasn’t for me long term.
Essentially, we went back and forth for a couple months and we didn’t think it was going to get done. The weather team’s pretty stacked over there right now, we have Todd Gutner who used to be a chief in Boston, we have Tom Johnston who used to be down in Jacksonville, so you have all these technically higher market kind of guys in this mid-market place. It just seemed like maybe it wasn’t going to happen.
They came up with something, and we started talking about schedule and making it a good lifestyle move. That was the big thing for me is, if I’m going to come here, let’s make it really nice. There aren’t many good shifts in television, so let’s make this one of them, where I’m working not early and not late, and kind of in sync with my wife’s schedule, and that would be a big benefit to coming back here.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: What does your wife do?
Keith Carson: She’s in public relations, so she works a normal… when we were in Atlanta, she worked at this University called Kennesaw State, which was actually about 30,000 undergrads and she was doing PR for them, so she had very what I called state hours. She would be back at 4:30 or whatever, and I was working all kinds of crazy shifts, so we were just thinking going forward, she was going to have a normal schedule, she has for years, and I’ve never had one.
I’ve either worked weekend mornings, or weekend nights, or at the Weather Channel, I worked eight or nine different schedules over the course of three years. That was starting to become a point where we’re like, “Okay, we’ve got to figure out a way to make this not so dissimilar.” We don’t have children right now, but you know, if we did, this whole thing doesn’t fit.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: It seems like people like Joe Cupo, Kevin Mannix, and actually lots of newscasters in this area, there’s some people in this particular market who stay for literally decades, because I remember them from when I was young.
Keith Carson: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: That’s different than I think many other markets.
Keith Carson: Yeah, it is. Cupo, I think retired with 37 or 38 years; it was the only job he’s ever had. You know Pat Callaghan and Cindy Williams, they’re there. I don’t see them leaving; they’re not that old first of all, and they’re going to retire there, that’s the plan. I think it’s Maine.
The station is great to work for, that is a plus, and being a dominant #1 does make your life easier because no one’s trying to accomplish that much. I mean that in the best possible way; like they’re going to do good stuff but they’re not trying to catch anyone, and if you’re in a second or third place station, it’s a different environment. It’s, “What can we do to undercut these guys?” That’s just not the case at Channel 6, and it hasn’t been since I’ve been there.
I really think ultimately it’s Maine. I think people fall in love with it and don’t want to leave, and most of the people who are long tenured, except for Mannix, are not actually from Maine. That’s what’s interesting; Cupo is from New York, and he still had a New York accent 37 years later, which I always gave him a hard time about. “How’d you not lose this in this period of time?”
They fall in love with the state, and then they find the job that they like and they say, “There’s really no point in leaving, what am I going to get out of it?” I think when I decided to leave, there was a little smirk and a “we might see you again” kind of a situation. They were right.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, I’m guessing that the weather itself, like the actual weather around outside, may not be quite as diverse as the New England weather that got you into this.
Keith Carson: Right, and you know, it’s funny. When we moved to Atlanta for the job, our biggest concern was, “Are we going to like Georgia?” I figured, definitely love the job. Life never stacks up the way you think; we actually came to like Georgia. It has seasons, that’s the biggest thing for me. I don’t think I could do a Florida thing, especially central and southern Florida where really, there are very little variations.
The thing about Georgia that’s interesting is that, people don’t realize if you haven’t spent much time there, they have fall foliage. It just so happens that it’s in November; it’s later. They have winter, and it may mean they average two or three inches of snow a year. For me, it was just enough season to keep it interesting; what you add to it is more severe weather.
I remember the first time a tornado siren went off in our neighborhood. My wife’s like, “Whoa. What do we do about this?” Luckily, the answer was me looking at the radar and saying, “Nothing.” It’s a new experience, so you do add tornado threat to it, but there are a lot of hardcore meteorologists who couldn’t step away from big snowstorms because that’s what they love, particularly in New England.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: It seems like I’ve heard of people who are tornado chasers. It seems like there are certain types of weather that appeal to different people. If that’s true, what’s your favorite kind of weather?
Keith Carson: You know, I do like a good snowstorm, but tropics also interest me because of how long you’re watching the storms, and obviously the magnitude of impact they can have. Even the worst snowstorms do not do what a category three or four hurricane does. I mean, this one right now, there’s this storm we’re watching right now and I think those two things interest me.
I think the passion comes from where you’re from. We had hurricane experts at the Weather Channel, that’s what they did, and our main hurricane guy was from New Orleans, so it would make sense that was his passion, right? He was from New Orleans. Our severe weather people, one of them was from Georgia. I think it’s what you grow up with, and what catches your attention, and then our winter weather expert is from Buffalo.
I think all of this lines up. What you experienced as a kid that awes you, I think is what sticks with you. In New England, it’s going to most likely be snow. For me, I’d say it’s snow, tropical weather, and then severe’s probably third, partially because I just didn’t deal with it very much. I did only at The Weather Channel when they sent me you Missouri or Oklahoma.
I also think the violent, destructive nature of that takes some of the fun out of it for me, if that makes any sense, you know. We had gotten a lot of tornado aftermath, and you understand what’s happening here to these people, so it makes it less interesting… I don’t know, to me, because you know what it can do.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah, I would think that would be really hard, that you can say, “Ah, that’s so fascinating that this phenomenon has occurred, something I’ve studied all this time,” but then if you’re on the ground, and you’re seeing smashed houses and people that don’t have water or electricity, I mean, there’s something very real about that.
Keith Carson: I got sent to a tornado in… it was in Missouri, I’m trying to think of the town now. I think it was Columbia, and basically, this tornado had occurred on the 23rd of December. I got a call at five o’clock, we got a crew together, we went out there. We arrived basically on Christmas Eve morning, and it was a three dead, houses destroyed situation; there were first responders on the scene, but that was about it.
That one really hit hard because they were people… it was Christmas, and these people were like digging through stuff. Also, as a weather person, it’s interesting, that was tough for me because that’s not what I do. I think a lot of reporters could go in there and stick a mic in someone’s face and ask them about it, and that was very difficult for me.
I could talk to people, but didn’t really at that moment want to say, “Hey, do you also want to be on national TV about this?” It was interesting, it showed me… in weather, you don’t have to do that very often, but that one stuck with me because of the timing and the intensity of it, and frankly in a lot of places where these tornadoes hit, a lot of times are not wealthy areas, so that does make it worse too, is that it’s not like, “Oh yeah, I’m sure they have insurance and someone to stay with,” it’s not always the case.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: It also seems like these things hit, and then people are dealing with this years and years later. I mean, we’re still dealing with the aftermath of Katrina.
Keith Carson: Right.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: This newest thing has happened in Haiti, I mean they’re still dealing with an earthquake that happened quite a long time ago, so these natural disasters, they happen, and then it’s not like we can have FEMA that can come in in the United States and just clean everything up, and then it’s all good.
Keith Carson: Right. In New Orleans too, part of what happened is people don’t want to move back, so even once you try shore it up a little bit and clean it up, we went there last year, and there’s still entire areas that are abandoned, and I think it’s just a matter of, it was too scarring of an experience for people to want to be back in the same spot.
The truth is, as much as New Orleans protects itself with levees, it’s still vulnerable, it’s still very low, it still sits in the Gulf of Mexico, so at the end of the day, you could build a house there and you can’t guarantee that’ its not going to happen again. I think that scares people, and in other countries, yeah, it’s often even worse. They have no kind of relief mechanism, and even Wilma hit down toward the Yucatan peninsula years ago, and I remember we had gone on vacation in that area like four years later, and it was still… they rebuilt the tourist stuff fast, but the rest of it was still leveled.
Yeah, it takes years and sometimes when these things pile up is when places don’t recover, which is why I like snow. Snow doesn’t really… doesn’t devastate the same way. It may be annoying, and there are car accidents, but other than that, you could have some fun with snow, and it’s not, you know, as bad.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Now I’m thinking about the ice storm that many of us lived through, and I can’t remember what year. Maybe 1996….
Keith Carson: 1998?
Dr. Lisa Belisle: 1998, somewhere around there. I’m not great with dates; I always date it by how old my children were. I know I had small children….
Keith Carson: You were in the ballpark.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Exactly. Even though we don’t have the same devastation from snowstorms… I mean this was an ice storm, and this was major and massive… I was working at the hospital as a resident at that time, and there were people coming in, they had no way to plug their oxygen machines into the wall, they had no heat, they had no electricity, and we were all impacted by it.
I was amazed by the number of people who came from other places, specifically like the electrical companies that just sent people up here until it was all taken care of. Have you experienced that same good heartedness and compassion and willingness to help?
Keith Carson: Yeah, I think in most areas they do band together, and you’re right. Ice storms really are the biggest thing, I mean other than us somehow getting clipped with a tropical system which is pretty hard to do. Ice storms, nobody likes those, right? Nobody is like, “Oh great, there’s ice, I can use my snowmobile or whatever.” I think for the Northeast, that’s your most vulnerable, crippling kind of thing, it’s usually in a power outage standpoint.
Yeah, I mean they have these systems. When I first got out of school, I was forecasting at this company Massachusetts, and they do aviation forecasting; they also do energy forecasting. We’d have clients like Louisiana, we had one, Entergy, we’d call them and tell them, “All right, your risk of power outage is blah-blah-blah.”
They had this co-op situation where it’s almost like a fire department where they say, “Okay, this is a six alarm, we need to send all these crews,” and then the expectation is, you know if it happens in their area, you will send people too, and that helps a lot because sometimes they can’t get the trucks out of the way, and the trucks are actually disabled.
That’s one of the biggest things we try to do for them forecasting is they would say, “Do we need to move this fleet out of the zone and then come back later? If they get destroyed, then we can’t help.” Yeah, I see a lot of good stuff out of these disasters, no doubt. People would still rather it not be a thing, but we worked with this guy who basically had made a lot of money at a young age, and he went into just creating this fleet in which they’d go to these disasters.
It’s called First Response Team of America, and they basically just go as a non-profit, and they help obviously these bigger organizations that are there to begin with. I give people like that a lot of credit, and they need it. I mean people need help in this scenario, and part of it is mental, too. A lot of the stuff they do is just pick up stuff, even if it’s… people are going through rubble and the Red Cross will come by with sandwiches.
You know, it seems so small but at the time, that helps, and it kind of brings people together.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I’m wondering how the whole conversation about climate change has impacted you because you were educated during the time where we started talking about this, and you’re like, you’re there. I’m not sure that everybody who’s done meteorology over the years has really been at the frontline the way that you are now.
We talk about climate refugees for example; people who left the Katrina stricken areas and never went back, essentially. Some people could call them climate refugees. What are your thoughts on that?
Keith Carson: You know, my thing is first and foremost, the earth is warming. I don’t know why people even debate that, that’s just the science of it. You can argue if you want what or whom is causing it, but it really doesn’t change that much other than… you know, I liken it to, maybe you wear a bike helmet, and you don’t feel like you need to.
Well, what’s the worst case of wearing that helmet? That’s kind of the same thing with some of the emission things they’re doing based on global warming. What is the argument for polluting more being a good thing? Either way, that needs to be curbed.
I think what happens with global warming is it becomes this political thing. There’s a lot of things like this in the country that shouldn’t be political, and they are, and that’s near the top, but I still know meteorologists who push back on the whole thing, and it’s because it’s become divided.
In my opinion, obviously we’re warming; I don’t like to attribute it to specific events, though. That’s the only time I have a problem, and you’ll see it in the media, and I can say that because I’m in it. Say, Hurricane Matthew turns into this big thing and hits the east coast, “Well, this is global warming.”
I mean, there’s been a lot of big hurricanes over the years, and even if you look at New Orleans, the area that didn’t flood as bad was the French Quarter. That was the oldest part of the city. Guess what? That’s because they built it on the relative hill of that area because they were aware they were at sea level.
I think trying to attribute specific events to global warming I think is, you getting in trouble with that. You’re talking about general rise in temperature which is happening every year, polar melting, all that, that’s real, but I don’t like them to say, “Tornado outbreak, that’s because of global warming,” because now you’re mixing meteorology with climate; they’re not the same thing.
It’s why I can’t go out and argue one way or another on global warming because that’s not my specific zone. You understand that on a doctor standpoint, it’s you have specialties, and being a meteorologist, is you’re doing 5 to 15 days out, you’re not doing years and years. You have to defer to people who do that for a living, and I just wish it’d be less political because it’s in everybody’s best interests to fix this problem.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I think that’s a great answer. I like the thoughtfulness that you put into that. Well, I encourage people to, well, obviously, watch Keith Carson on WCSH 6, I guess 6 in this area and other….
Keith Carson: 2 would be….
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Up in the Bangor area.
Keith Carson: Yes, we take over their signal. Yep.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: To maybe learn a little bit more about what Keith does and meteorology, and this has really been a fascinating conversation; I actually wish that we had another whole hour because I feel like there’s so much we could talk about. This has been really great.
I have been speaking with Keith Carson, who with 10 years of media experience, has covered everything from tornado aftermath in Oklahoma to blizzards in Chicago, and has now returned here to WCSH 6 and 2 TV here in the Portland and Bangor area. I appreciate your coming in and having this conversation, it’s been great to talk to you.
Keith Carson: Thank you, I really enjoyed it, and I’m happy to be back in Maine.
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Dr. Lisa Belisle: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, show #275, Faces of Maine Broadcasting. Our guests have included Pat Callaghan and Keith Carson. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page.
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This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Faces of Maine Broadcasting show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day, and if you are listening to this on December 25th, and you celebrate this holiday, Merry Christmas. May you have a bountiful life.
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