Birmingham’s First Weatherman

A couple of weeks ago, I had lunch with one of Birmingham’s weather legends and one of my weather heroes…Ray White. Ray brought real weather information to Birmingham five years before our current weather hero, James Spann made the Magic City TV Weather Scene. – Bill Murray

Ray White was born on Birmingham’s West Side. He grew up in Pratt City. His father worked in the mines. As he went through his childhood, he knew that there were three things he wanted to do. 1. He wanted to be in broadcasting. 2. He wanted to practice mortuary science. 3. He wanted to be in law enforcement.

He was introduced to radio by his father. He clearly remembers listening to the radio with his dad during the war years, hearing great voices like Edward R. Murrow. This fascinated him.

When hard times hit the mines, Ray’s father took a job with a Michigan Company. In 1954, Ray and his mother joined his dad. There he learned from legendary Detroit weatherman Marvin “Sonny” Eliot. The wacky entertainer had a way to communicate his forecasts to his listeners on WWJ-TV starting 1950. Ray learned from what he saw. One of the things he learned was that Sonny communicated visually by drawing the weather on air.

When his father passed away in 1959, his family moved back to Birmingham and he entered the service. In 1964, Ray got out of the service as a Sergeant. It was time to try his hand at broadcasting. He contacted Birmingham radio icon Tommy Charles. TC gave Ray his shot with a Sunday morning sign on assignment. Tommy was honest with him. He said “You have a great voice, but I can’t use you. You need to go out and get on with a small radio station. Work your way up.”

Ray got a job at radio station WRAG in Carrollton. He was given the opportunity to do it all. Sales, writing, on air work. It was great experience. Mr. Hook, the owner of the radio station had the maximum number of stations that you could own at the time according to FCC regulations. He also owned a movie theatre in each city where he had a radio station.
A new medium would seek him out while he was on 590 AM. Woolco became the host of a new Sunday morning television variety show. This would be his television break.

Ray left WRAG for WDDT in Greenville, Mississippi. Then he went back to another station owned by Mr. Hook, WELZ in Belzoni. Things didn’t work out so well there, and he found himself back at station WYAM “on the banks of beautiful Valley Creek” in Birmingham.

In the fall of 1967, Ray befriended Charlie Wideman, another Birmingham broadcasting personality who was the weatherman and sales manager on Channel 42. Wideman gave Ray the chance to come to the station and watch what he did. It would pay off in a few years.

It was back to television in Montgomery as News Director at WKAB in the Capital City. There he got to meet politicians and other influential people like Governor George Wallace.

That would lead to a funny story a few years later when Ray decided to pull up stakes and move to Fort Lauderdale to enjoy the warm weather South Florida has to offer. He took an engineering job at a radio station. In 1971, Governing Wallace was campaigning for President. One of the reporters at the station wanted to meet the candidate. Ray found this out and offered to introduce him. The reporter was incredulous that the engineer actually knew the Governor.

So Ray, a good friend of the Governor’s security detail, took the reporter to the speaking location. The detail welcomed Ray and the doubting reporter got the interview.

Ray took a job as a caretaker for an apartment building on the Southside. He was working for radio station WCRT on the weekend. Ray finally got his big break and got a job covering stories for Channel 42. Armed with a Bolex camera and tape recorder, Ray went out each day and gathered video for the newscast.

Channel 42 featured Larry Matson doing news, Tommy Charles on Sports and Ray Wideman doing weather. Larry Matson was also the News Director. Our intrepid Ray White was the co-anchor with Larry and says that his time at 42 was very fun. It was a different atmosphere than what we have in local television news today.

When Larry Matson left, Ray would continue as co-anchor and News Director. During his time at 42, Ray would pull sports stories and scores off the wire for the zany Sports Director Tommy Charles, who would make the decisions about what he would broadcast on the fly during the actual newscast, discarding stories even as viewers watched him leaf through the copy. Once, Ray lit the trailing teletype copy on fire, which elicited a shocked response from the unflappable TC.

In 1974, Ray made the jump into weather. Herb Coleman, an engineer at 42 was also a student of the weather. He instructed Ray to go to the National Weather Service and ask for help. They worked out a way to write on a chalkboard with a special writing instrument made from an Elmer’s glue bottle with the tip cut. The medium was liquid chalk combined in the perfect proportion with glycerin. The idea was inspired by a Montgomery weatherman who had used a chalkboard to communicate with his audience.

His main source of information was a teletype connected to the National Weather Service. But his knowledge came from a nightly trip to the Weather Service Forecast Office at 11 West Oxmoor Road. Ray says that he would work all day shooting stories, then jog, eat dinner, shower and head to the weather office.

There, great weathermen like J.B. Elliott, Harold Quattlebaum, Joe Wheeler, Bob Kilduff and Jay Shelley would given him a briefing. It was back to the station around 830 or 9, and Ray would communicate real weather knowledge directly to his audience. He says he owes a great deal of gratitude to Herb Coleman and all those forecasters at the Weather Service for those daily briefings.

Birmingham had a history of renowned weather personalities. Pat Gray and Rosemary Lucas are legends in broadcasting. But Ray spoke another language. It was the language of meteorology. And it demystified the science for a 12 year who was fascinated by the weather: me.

One of the most memorable nights that Ray experienced, as for many of us, was April 3, 1974. Television was different then. There was hardly any interrupting programming for weather bulletins, certainly no wall to wall coverage. No fancy Doppler radar displays. No colorful graphics systems. As the long night wore on, Ray would hit the air with quick breaks, updating viewers. The information was coming off the wire almost faster than it could be interpreted or reported. During the ten o’clock news, Ray read a statement from the National Weather Service Birmingham that listed a number of fatalities. Before he had even read it, Herb Coleman was off camera handing him an updated death toll report that had increased dramatically.

In my mind, he was truly Birmingham’s finest television weather personality until one James Spann arrived on the scene in 1979, one year after Ray White left the television weather business. It would be a bleak year in television weather in Birmingham. But at least by then, we had NOAA Weather Radio and J.B. to keep us posted.

In an interesting twist, Ray also pursued his desire to be involved in mortuary sciences, serving as a part time funeral director. He says that he got quite a few double takes when working with families or at graveside. “Aren’t you…”

Ray went to work for the Shelby County Sherriff’s Department as a deputy, fulfilling the third part of his life’s vocational goals. His interest in mortuary science would pay off with a long assignment with the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences as a Forensic Investigator. CSI has nothing on Ray! He recently retired after several years of service with the State ABC Board. His brother always said that he knew Ray was going to be a a G-man.

But the main message that this amazingly Alabama broadcasting and law enforcement legend wants to impart beside his appreciation to people like Herb Coleman and the weather guys at WSFO Birmingham is: “This is America. The beauty of this country is that you can do anything that you want to do if you are willing to sacrifice and work hard.”

Here is a picture of Ray today…

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