Tim Deegan is retiring, but he'll still be looking at the clouds, forecasting weather

Yahoo

5 days ago

Tim Deegan has kept a framed forecast on his desk at First Coast News for years.
It isn't one of the tens of thousands of forecasts he's delivered to Jacksonville viewers in the last 43 years at WTLV-Ch. 12 and WJXX-Ch. 25, or even one from when he first appeared on television in Texas.
This forecast goes back to when he was 6 years old, growing up in Wilmington, Delaware.
He had severe asthma and when his parents kept him inside, he'd often end up looking out a window and not just seeing the sky, but wondering what it meant. Why did this cloud lead to thunderstorms and that one didn't? And how did someone predict that?
After his father finished reading the Philadelphia Inquirer, Tim would take it and turn to Page 2 to look at the weather map and forecast. And if there was one thing he paid attention to on television, it was when Dr. Francis Davis came on to give his forecast. Davis was a broadcasting pioneer, a meteorologist first and foremost, hired to be on television.
Not that Deegan thought much about this, or television in general, at that age. He just knew he was fascinated by all things weather. So at some point he started doing his own quite detailed forecasts.
His father took one of these forecasts to work. A secretary saved it and later gave it back to Tim's parents, who gave it back to him, framed as a graduation gift, when he got his meteorology degree at Texas A&M and headed down this career path.
It's sitting on his desk along with some items that you'd find on many a work desk — family photos and such — but quite a few others that have some sort of tie to weather. A stack of books that's heavy on weather (titles such as 'Isaac's Storm' and 'Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World'). A photo of the eye of Hurricane Cleo in 1964. His latest journal with hand-written daily notes.
While he uses all the modern-day tools to forecast the weather, he has continued to keep journals, which feel like a continuation of the framed piece of paper from 1966.
'Tim's weather report,' it says at the top of the page.
At the bottom of the page, there's a map of the United States, with arrows and fronts drawn on it. It includes an hour-by-hour forecast, on the 30-minutes, with kids' handwriting and a misspelled word but some precise predictions for the vicinity.
At twelve 30 PM, tempeture about 32 degrees, chance of snow 71 p
Not 70 percent or 75 percent. Seventy-one percent.
'If I was anywhere near that good now …' he said with a laugh, while showing that forecast to a couple of visitors to the station.
After he announced last fall that he was planning to retire on May 30, 2025 — something that has been planned ever since he signed his last contract three years ago and stopped doing the 11 p.m. news — someone asked how many broadcasts he's done. He did some rough math and came up with 40,000.
Now 65, he says he has kept that childhood forecast on his desk not just for pure nostalgia, but as a reminder to himself.
If something about the job ever was irritating him, he could look at that forecast and say to himself, 'You know, they're paying me basically to do what I've been doing since I was six.''
When he went to college, he knew he wanted to get his meteorology degree. But he still had no interest in television.
'I was going to grow long hair and a beard and do research,' he said. 'I was convinced anybody on TV was a clown.'
This was the era when people doing the weather were, first and foremost, entertainers. And in the case of NBC's longtime weatherman Willard Scott, he had first appeared on television as some famous clowns, Bozo and the original Ronald McDonald.
But a few things happened. First, Deegan spent part of a summer actually doing research, working in a basement, doing computer programming, not seeing clouds for months. Between that and failing Differential Equations twice, he realized he didn't want to get more degrees and do research.
Second, after he passed Differential Equations on his third attempt, he returned to A&M for one final semester. At the time, following a budget battle in Congress, the National Weather Service had a hiring freeze. He wasn't sure what he was going to do beyond enjoying some Aggies football games that fall. Maybe try to join the Peace Corps.
Then a notice was posted on a bulletin board. It said a local television station in Bryan/College Station, Texas, was looking for a meteorology student to do morning forecasts. Deegan tried out and got the job.
'And you know why?' he said. 'No one else tried out. … It came on at 5:30 a.m. and was mainly for the farmers. I guarantee none of my friends on campus ever saw me.'
He figures that when it comes to the first show, maybe that's for the best. There isn't any video of it, but he remembers it.
The day before he'd played in an Ultimate Frisbee game on the A&M football field. On the last play of the game he went up for a catch, collided with two other guys who were coming down and broke his nose.
'So my first day on the air, I have a broken nose and raccoon eyes,' he said.
Not that this fazed him. Even though he hadn't done TV before, he'd had classes where the undergrads had to get up in front of the PhD students and give their forecasts. So he felt like he was just combining forecasting with talking for a few minutes, drawing a weather map on a white board with red and blue markers.
He remembers that after that first broadcast, his boss was very complimentary but told him to go back and watch the tape. When Deegan did, he realized, 'my map looked like a hornet's nest.'
Still, he felt like he'd stumbled upon something he could do, something he couldn't believe he'd get paid to do. And as his boss said after seeing the college kid show up with a broken nose, 'If people are still following you after how you looked this morning, you're going to be OK,'
This was an era when local stations were rapidly adding morning shows. Within weeks, Deegan got offered an internship in Corpus Christi. And not long after he started, there was some severe weather. The station needed to record a promo. The chief meteorologist was on vacation. The weekend guy kept trying to record it but kept messing up, reacting with a string of expletives, leading to the owner firing him.
'So suddenly I'm working seven days a week and loving it,' Deegan said. 'By the time I graduated, I absolutely knew that's what I wanted to do.'
It's shortly before the 5 p.m. newscast. Deegan already has done a 4 p.m. streaming webcast with meteorologist Ross Mummah. It's more informal than a traditional forecast, and one of many things that didn't exist when Deegan first walked into this building at age 22.
In 1982, the station was adding to its weather team while launching this market's first morning show: Good Morning Jacksonville.
He got a small apartment on North Street in Neptune Beach and barely bothered to furnish it. He already was living the dream. Or at least his dream. He could surf and forecast interesting weather?
That's the simplified version of why this was his first stop out of college — and also why it became his last one.
He gives credit to Ch. 4 meteorologist George Winterling, who retired in 2009 and died in 2023, for long ago setting the tone for forecasting in this market.
'When I was new here, I learned that this market was considered a weather market,' Deegan said. 'And what that meant was people expected a serious attempt to forecast. George was basically almost a generation ahead.'
As he walks through the station on the Friday before his final newscast, Deegan talks about how much has changed, in this building, on television and in weather forecasting.
Some of the changes are positive (from newsrooms no longer filled with smoke to significantly more accurate long-range hurricane forecasts). Some are disconcerting. He worries about what cuts to the National Weather Service will mean — particularly cuts that mean fewer weather balloons in the sky.
'The National Weather Service is the only group in the United States that sends up weather balloons,' he said. 'Now that may sound old school, but the weather balloons give us a three-dimensional nature to meteorology. The best computer models in the world … they're using information from those weather balloons. So if we continue to cut the number of weather balloons, that's going to hurt everybody's forecasting.'
He's wearing a red tie with a sun, moon, clouds and a row of kids holding hands. A teacher sent him it after he spoke at a school. When he started doing this job, he had no idea this would end up being part of it. And yet speaking to students became one of his favorite parts of it.
He puts in his earpiece before heading into the studio, explaining that he can't take it out during the broadcast, which means he'll hear every commercial in his ear for 90 minutes and probably in his head much later — a part of the job he won't miss.
Once in the studio, with the clock nearing 5 p.m., anchor Jeannie Blaylock asks visitors if they've ever heard Deegan's mike check, which he proceeds to do.
Around the rough and rugged rock, the ragged rascal ran …
Sometimes he changes 'ran' to 'surfed' and the crew knows how he began his day.
Deegan's retirement means that Blaylock, who started at the station in 1985, will have the longest on-air tenure at First Coast News. When it comes to local meteorologists, Action News Jax chief meteorologist Mike Buresh, who has been there since 2002, will have the longest tenure, followed by News4Jax chief meteorologist Richard Nunn, who started in 2004.
And as hurricane season officially begins, Lew Turner will take over as chief meteorologist at First Coast News — timing that, Deegan explains, is a coincidence tied to when his latest contract ends and, this time, retirement begins.
It was shortly before dawn at the beach on a recent Sunday morning.
Tim and Donna Deegan — the former First Coast News anchor, his wife since 2002, and the mayor of Jacksonville since 2023 — begin many mornings with a run down to the beach to see the sun come up. So it seemed fitting to talk about Tim's retirement on one of those runs.
When the sun does start to appear, or at least the first light illuminating the clouds, Donna stops to take pictures.
'As far as morning clouds are concerned, I can honestly say Donna is a better observer than me now,' Tim says.
When people ask him what he's going to do in retirement, his stock answers are 'no socks, no ties' and 'have more time to walk the mayor's dog.'
These are glib answers. But there is truth in them. He doesn't have grand plans. He's looking forward to not feeling like a chunk of his life is scheduled down to the second. And really, he started easing toward this when he stopped doing the 11 o'clock news. So he'll just do more of what he's already doing. Start the day at the beach. Read lots of books. Make it to more of the mayor's events.
He prefaces everything by saying how grateful he is to have had his career, to have had people allow him to come into their homes and try to forecast their weather. But he says he's quite ready to not be on TV.
'I hesitate to tell on myself this way, because I love to learn, but after 43 years of the next new technology, the next new social media thing we need to be on, the next new password, I think there are atoms in my body going, 'Enough,''' he said. 'I want to keep learning, but hopefully other things.'
He says that in the last 43 years he learned a lot, some of it having to do with forecasting. And before he's asked about it, he brings up a time when he became the news. In 2013, he was arrested for driving under the influence. He pleaded no contest to the charge, had his license suspended for six months and agreed to perform 50 hours of community service. He also was temporarily off the air.
'It was one of the worst things that happened to me and one of the best,' he said. 'I had been in a decades long dark spiral and now through the help of others life seems so bright and free.'
One thing he plans to do in retirement — something that won't come as a surprise to family, colleagues and, for that matter, viewers who have watched his hair lately.
Let it grow.
'My next haircut is scheduled for like six months,' he said. 'But it's not because I have a certain length in mind. It's because I can. It could be that within three months I get tired of it.'
You might say this has been a long-running battle during his career. But it goes back farther than that. In an interview with Blaylock, his mother, Margie, said she thinks he's more handsome with short hair, but she long ago gave up that fight. And his father once gave him a T-shirt that says: 'You need a haircut.'
This is something that management told him more than once through the years.
When he tells a story about decades ago getting it cut quite short — so short that management said it was too short — Donna adds: 'Let's be clear, that was not often the issue.'
Even with hair, he manages to bring the conversation back to the weather. He says that he values computer models and modern tools, but when he's on vacation, he finds himself simply looking at the sky, trying to figure out the weather. He likes old-fashioned methods. And did you know that once upon a time, barometers used hair to measure humidity, particularly blond hair?
'So I'm just trying to be a better meteorologist,' he says.
He's joking. Sort of. If there's one thing that hasn't changed in 43 years, it's that he really wants to get his latest forecast right. People ask him about the big storms. And of course he recalls being on the air for many days during Matthew and Irma. But he also remembers a sunny day in one of his early years in Jacksonville. The problem with that? The young meteorologist had forecast rain, telling people to plan indoor activities. When it was a beautiful sunny day, he stayed inside.
That hasn't completely changed. Donna says that if they have a family event and she's hoping for a certain kind of weather and they get it, she's happy. And Tim?
'If he didn't forecast it, he'll be upset,' she said.
Tim shrugs, as if to say he's not necessarily proud of this but it's true. If he called for rain and it rains, he says, "I'm stoked."
After May 30, he won't be sharing his forecast with the public five nights a week. Although if you bump into him and ask a question about the weather, be prepared for a long answer.
None of this means he'll stop forecasting. He's retiring, not quitting something he's been doing since he was 6. So he'll still be looking at the skies and computer models, trying to figure out the weather.
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This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Tim Deegan retires after 43 years as First Coast News meteorologist