Bill Walsh is the Dr. Seuss of weathermen.
For 40 years as of today, he’s offered the latest weather info to Lowcountry residents in just about every way possible.
He did the weather on a camel. With a bear. And at the fair.
He did it with an eagle and his dog, a hound that looks a little like a beagle.
With an elephant. On horseback. With snakes, a snapping turtle, an orangutan, a panther and a tiger. He even kissed a dolphin on the air.
And then, there was the skunk during a Southeastern Wildlife Expo broadcast back in the 1990s.
“We were live on the air, and I felt this warm moist feeling, and all of a sudden, I started smelling something bad, really bad,” Walsh said. “The whole front of me was soaked. But the skunk was fine. He was very well-behaved.”
Walsh recalls it took two days for the smell to go away.
“I thought, ‘I’m going to need a bath in milk or something,’” he said, laughing. “It was hysterical. The photographer was horrified. And it really did stink. I was afraid to get in my car because it would stink up the seats.”
The sun also rises
Walsh, a 63-year-old resident of Hollywood, wakes up excited every day to do the weather. On Sept. 15, he started his fifth decade of providing information about hurricanes, tornados, highs and lows.
“He is the funniest guy I’ve ever worked with in televisio,n and I was in TV here in Charleston for 48 years,” said retired Channel 5 anchor Bill Sharpe. “He is always quick with a quip, and it’s hard to talk about his personality without saying, pardon the pun, he always has a sunny day when he’s on television. He is always optimistic and always has a sunny forecast, no matter what his weather forecast is.”
Sharpe said the Lowcountry is lucky to have Walsh.
“He was always decent, kind, sensitive and funny. He is just a jewel of a man.”
A driving, ahem, force behind Walsh’s weather broadcasts is to provide solid information to his audience at Live 5 News, a lesson he learned in 1989’s Hurricane Hugo when he was just 27.
“I learned that it’s important to alert people, but not alarm them,” he told the Charleston City Paper. “Also, a calm, steady flow of information without hype about what the storm is doing and impacts it could bring is critical.”
And yes, this is from the guy who showed up in a bathrobe during a live morning broadcast holding a cake to wish a happy birthday to a colleague. Same guy who jumped into a giant tub of Jell-O to help the folks at Special Olympics.
Most mornings when he’s working, Walsh rises around 9 a.m., takes a walk and does some exercises. He often has public events around lunchtime, such as a visit to a school or a speech.
“I get to the station around 1:30 p.m. or 2 and start prepping for the shows by looking at the weather models, working on graphics, doing radio broadcasts and social media updates,” he said. “Then I go on the air at 4, 5, 6, 6:30 with our First Alert live streaming weather show and at 7. I usually head home around 8 p.m.”
It’s a long day for the Rhode Island native who got started in 1984 in his home state as a cable news morning meteorologist. He came to Charleston in 1986 to work at WCIV-TV and moved in 1993 to Channel 5, where he’s been chief meteorologist for years, often battling with Channel 2’s Rob Fowler for best meteorologist in the City Paper’s annual Best of Charleston contest. (Fowler celebrates his 40th year in 2027.)
Walsh said the biggest continuing challenge of his job is to make an accurate forecast day after day with the challenges provided by the mix of weather from the ocean to the east and mountains to the west.
“It’s exciting to forecast, but also tricky at the same time,” he said.
Through the years, Walsh has also been associated with the military. He spent 23 years in the Navy and Air Force reserves while an on-air personality full-time. During his time in the reserves, he was deployed to Bulgaria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It was like having two entirely different careers at the same time and bounding back and forth between them,” said Walsh, who retired as a lieutenant colonel in 2017. “I had my Monday through Friday TV meteorologist job, and then I would go and put on my uniform, fly out to an aircraft carrier for a few days or week or whatever.
“After 2002 when in the Air Force Reserve, I’d jump on a C-17 mission or Special Operations trip. It was super cool to be able to do both.”
Walsh, who has two children with his wife Janet, also has written two novels — The Umbrella Option and Red Carpet Ransom. He’s received numerous Emmy Awards and other accolades for his broadcasts, military medals for his service and is a longtime community volunteer.
Really memorable experiences through the years? Flying in jets with the Thunderbirds and Blue Angels, diving into a pool in a suit to help raise money to help animals, chasing tornadoes and broadcasting live from New York’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses Parade.
All in a day’s work.
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