Weather, animals were passions for Goddard
Summit County native Dick Goddard, who spent decades on TV telling us whether to grab an umbrella or wear a coat before venturing outside, has died.
His daughter Kim Goddard had turned to social media in recent weeks asking for prayers, saying her father was gravely ill. She said in one post in early June that her father had contracted the coronavirus.
Goddard died Tuesday morning at an undisclosed medical facility in Florida. He was 89.
When Goddard said his last farewell to viewers on Nov. 22, 2016, at WJW TV-8 in Cleveland, he set a Guinness World Record for having the longest career as a weather forecaster at 51 years and 6 days.
This ended a broadcasting career that began a quarter turn of the TV dial at Channel 3, then KYW, on May 1, 1961, where he nervously referred to “froaking crogs” in an initial broadcast.
After a short 13-week contract, he moved on and eventually settled in at WJW, where his subsequent contracts were much longer at some 3,000 weeks.
Born in Akron on Feb. 24, 1931, he called Green and eventually Medina home.
His career began when he joined the Air Force in 1949 and was sent off to meteorology school.
When he left the service, he went to Kent State and worked at the weather bureau at Akron-canton airport, where he would do updates for area radio stations.
That all led to a TV career where Goddard not only told viewers whether it was going to snow or be sunny, but one in which he connected on a personal level.
Tens of thousands of fans would join him annually at the Wollybear Festival in Vermilion, where they celebrated the furry weather-predicting caterpillar.
Those same fans rallied around his efforts to raise awareness and money to help care for abused and abandoned pets.