Channel Flirting
Steven
Devadanam
TV weather personalities can be so typical.
There's the pretty one, whom you do hate because they're beautiful. Or the mini-scientists, deciphering rain clouds and correcting you on the difference between rain and sleet.
Then there's the small likable group, the Willards and Al Rokers, who are next door neighbors that just happen to have television contracts.
Or in Chuck George's case, they're all three.
Between local breaks from NBC's The Today Show, the amiable George can be seen at theaters, restaurants, schools or various charity events. He eats barbecue at rodeo cookouts. He hangs out with circus clowns. He paints elderly women's nails at retirement homes. High school girls throw him in swimming pools.
The 28-year-old meteorologist started with Channel 2 on Labor Day of last year, replacing then-weatherperson Orelon Sydney. Big shoes to fill, considering the sleek Sydney's no-nonsense approach has landed her at CNN doing weather. But she's hardly someone you'd throw in a pool.
So popular is the "community weather" concept that George is booked a month in advance. It's now become Breakfast with Chuck, as he'll broadcast from people's homes around the city.
"We've revamped the concept so that it's less corporate," he says, interrupted by screeching dot matrix printers updating weather bulletins. "Our goal is to get into the community, not advertise for businesses."
He considers interacting with people the best part of his work. It's a far departure from his decidedly non-TV start in Tucson.
"I was in charge of the flood warning system," he recalls. "I worked a year with no interaction with people at all, unless it was 'Hey, do you have your work done?' I hated it."
His career, in fact, hasn't followed the usual TV formula. As a child in Broken Arrow, Okla., George saw his first tornado at age three and essentially fell in love. "My bedtime became after the ten o' clock news," he jokes.
As an undergrad student in Oklahoma University, George was chasing tornadoes, not cameras. His work there was following twisters with the National Severe Storms Lab, the same group the movie Twister was based on. He then left the twister capitol to attend graduate school in Tucson, a hotbed of boring weather, but the place where George got his first stint in television, interning at the ABC affiliate station.
"I basically got coffee for the meteorologist there," he quips, cut off again by phone calls and printers.
Sitting in the middle of Channel 2's Accu-Weather center, George is like a little boy with his first computer, eagerly pointing to one of the slew of monitors. He rants about Doppler 2000, the station's state-of-the-art tracking system, as if it were a high-glossed Nintendo game.
So passionate about meteorology is the self-confessed "weather nerd" that he finds his schedule the only daunting task in what he does.
"The job is not that difficult, especially when you really love what you do," he says. "But the schedule can get tough. Waking up at three every day, you certainly appreciate your weekends."
Designing computer-generated weather maps while most morning radio hosts are getting out of bed, George's day is long underway at 4 a.m. By then he's in makeup, taping his forecast at that day's remote location. Then, it's back to the studio, out of his jeans and into his suit. He finds the studio work just as fun as the remote shoots, citing the more casual feel that weather offers.
"When you're doing news, everything's scripted, but I get to ad lib," he says. "You get more of a chance to let your personality come through."
He's interrupted now by a cameraman who tells him that it's time for his shoot. Taking his place in front the bare blue wall, he points at nothing and brightly chirps out the day's forecast in a friendly, boy-next-door tone. The result is an onscreen George standing in front of a full-screen weather map. 20 seconds later, he's done. So effortless is his delivery that it's hard to imagine him stumbling at all. But he did at his first job.
"I literally tripped my first time on the air; I fell on the step going back to the set after the forecast," he recalls, laughing. "I take off running, trying to talk and run. You can't see it, but you can hear this 'Boom!'"
The now able-footed George looks forward to his stay in Houston, turning down jobs in Phoenix, Denver and Miami to come to the Bayou City. It was the diversity of the city that brought him here, and meteorologist Frank Billingsley.
"Every time I turn him on I learn something new," he says of Channel 2's primetime meteorologist.
George is equally respected by his coworkers. "He's an absolute doll. We call him Chuckles," says afternoon anchor Dominique Sachse. "I think he's going to do really well here."
When he's not taking in a movie, George hangs out at Starbucks, works out at Bally's and does turkey burgers at Café Express. He's also occasionally being stopped by fans.
"I'll never have an ego doing this," he says. "It's equal, if someone stops me and says they love what I do, I want to know about them and what they're like."
Forecast finished, George can finally think about his weekend. He's heading to Tucson to visit a close-knit group of friends and to get his hair cut. Haircut?
"I own a salon there. It's called Elements. So I get my hair done there."
Coming from anyone else, that would sound pretentious, but he's just being frugal.
"Hey," he says, flashing a prom-king grin, "it's free."