His outlook was always sunny

Published 12:01 am Friday, May 27, 2011

Back before weather forecasting Doppled into a industry unto itself, complete with its own TV channel, web sites and colorful newspaper maps, before weathermen became meteorologists, the job had a more local flavor.

In the gray Northwest, no one filled this role more memorably than Ray Ramsey, KOMO-TV’s weatherman from 1965 to 1985, who died Sunday at age 87. He intuitively understood that delivering a forecast around here requires humor, to avoid the reflexive, collective “dismal” that could so easily suffice as a static prediction.

In fact, long before anyone heard of Season Affectiveness Disorder, Ramsey’s humor cheered his audience through 20 years of rainy days, and cheered with them on the more rare sunny ones. It seems appropriate his name was Ray.

Back before every aspect of television news broadcasting and advertising was researched to smooth out the rough local edges into a bland national sameness, a weatherman without an actor’s looks could wear a loud jacket and crack jokes and become a beloved, local, quirky icon.

Ramsey talked frenetically, like a fast-moving storm, sometimes mangling words, sometimes coining them. He invented the word “drizmal,” so very Northwesty (and decades ahead of rap’s “fo’ shizzle.”)

Ramsey did his old-school forecasting on a blackboard — no computer graphics, no radar. He was at home scribbling with the chalk, explaining what was coming, from where, and all the while throwing in little asides that sometimes you caught, and sometimes you did not. He, and his bosses, were willing to “cut a few people loose” with that humor, rather than insist that he follow an always understandable, if bland, script.

Ramsey was also a junior high school teacher, which speaks to his energy and the ability he had to reach people with his humor and kindness. He enjoyed his work, and it showed. He did not take himself too seriously, which now seems a nostalgic trait when it comes to TV news.

(His daughter Jodi Lien told the Seattle Times that her mother usually picked out Ramsey’s on-air wardrobe. But one time he was left to fend for himself, and later, on-air, he reached up to point out something on a map and the jacket’s price tag dangled before the camera.)

Those who knew him said he was a compassionate and funny man, and not at all different from his on-air personality.

Ramsey was the kind of man who took the time to answer fan mail from a fourth-grader who admired his humor and his hair (he was known as “Hayhead”), writing that most letters he received looked like chicken scratch written with a broom.

It was a TV era that, sadly, is long gone.