Throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, mornings in America had a certain air of predictability. In the background was one of the big three network morning programs: NBC’s The Today Show, ABC’s Good Morning America, or CBS This Morning — all of which remain on the air, of course, but lack the ubiquity they once enjoyed among a more unified, less polarized viewing public.
If you were among the millions who turned your dial to The Today Show during those years, the odds were good that, before everybody headed for the door, you caught at least one segment featuring the folksy truisms, heartfelt birthday wishes, and the by-then rather cursory nationwide weather reports of Willard Scott.
Scott, who died last week at age 87, was The Today Show’s weatherman, but far more than his forecasting acumen, it was his plain-spoken, honest-to-goodness decency that accounted for his popularity and durability. In many ways, Scott, who was the show’s primary weather forecaster from 1980 to 1996 but remained an occasional presence until 2015, was the glue that held the morning program together through host changes, format changes, and various controversies.
In 1989, Scott even weathered (pardon the pun) the storm that followed an internal memo by then-co-host Bryant Gumbel that was leaked for public consumption: Gumbel took Scott, whose repertoire had come to include transmitting birthday greetings to the elderly from coast to coast, to task for “his assortment of whims, wishes, birthdays and bad taste.” (For the record, Scott and Gumbel later had an on-air rapprochement.)
Anointed rather than trained as a weatherman, Scott could comfortably rattle off information about assorted cold and warm fronts, but no one who watched him routinely really did so for his meteorological chops. To the contrary, Scott was an old-fashioned, jack-of-all-trades broadcaster who gave the public what it wanted at 8 a.m. weekdays: “Whims, wishes, birthdays and bad taste,” as Gumbel, rather self-seriously, put it.
Not that Scott was anything like a rube: A native of Alexandria, Virginia, Scott was educated at American University in Washington, D.C., where he majored in philosophy and religion and minored in history, “which nobody would ever believe,” he said in a 2003 interview with Brian Lamb on C-SPAN while promoting one of his books. When asked by Lamb to name his favorite philosopher, Scott gave the same solid, unimpeachable answer that then-presidential candidate George W. Bush was once excoriated for: Jesus.
Of course, Scott, who had a youthful stint as a page on an NBC-owned radio station in the nation’s capital, was not destined to be a historian or a minister but a showman. Concurrent with a burgeoning career in radio, including as the co-host of the comedy program Joy Boys, Scott turned to the cathode-ray tube to incarnate two icons of popular culture: Bozo the Clown and Ronald McDonald, the mascot of the fast-food chain.
Then, in 1980, Scott became the secret sauce of the success of The Today Show during its peak years: Balancing Gumbel and his co-hosts, Jane Pauley, Deborah Norville, and, eventually, Katie Couric, Scott contributed good humor, horse sense, and an abundance of free advertising for Smucker’s jam to a role that could have been merely perfunctory.
It was easy to laugh at Scott. He even merited a punch line in Die Hard 2, though a more gracious cinematic tribute came in the classic comedy Groundhog Day. At one point in that film, Bill Murray’s sneering weatherman character mistakes lines written by Sir Walter Scott for Willard Scott. Of course.
About those birthdays Gumbel gave Scott such a hard time over? As he told it, they came about by happenstance in 1983, when the nephew of a man soon to be 100 wrote Scott to ask him to make note of the big day on the air. “Well, nobody had ever done that on The Today Show — that was kind of hokey,” Scott said on C-SPAN, but he went along with the idea, and the rest was history. “That is my entire contribution to the broadcasting industry today: to salute centenarians.” And though he pulled up short of 100, let us now salute him.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
