TV’S clown prince of sun and rain dies
Willard Scott, the antic longtime weather forecaster on the “Today” show, whose work, by his own cheerful acknowledgment, made clear that you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, died Saturday at his farm in Delaplane, Va. He was 87.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Paris Keena Scott. She did not specify a cause, saying only that he had died after a brief illness.
Scott, who had played Bozo the Clown and the original Ronald Mcdonald on television, was among the first of a generation of television weather forecasters who stressed showmanship over science. Throughout the late 20th century, he was also a ubiquitous television pitchman.
A garrulous, gaptoothed, boutonnière-wearing, funny-hatted, sometimes toupee-clad, larger-than-life American Everyman (in his prime, he stood 6-foot-3 and weighed nearly 300 pounds), Scott was hired in 1980 to help NBC’S “Today” compete with its chief rival, ABC’S “Good Morning America.”
Joining “Today” that March, Scott went on to sport a string of outré outfits, spout a cornucopia of cornpone humor and wish happy birthday to a spate of American centenarians, all while talking about the forecast every so often, until his retirement in 2015.
Although he was meant to represent the new, latemodel television weatherman, Scott brought to the job a brand of shtick that harked back to earlier times. He seemed simultaneously to embody the jovial, backslapping Rotarian of the mid-20th century, the midway barker of the 19th and, in the opinion of at least some critics, the court jester of the Middle Ages.
There was the time, for instance, that he delivered the forecast dressed as Boy George. There was the time he did so dressed as Carmen Miranda, the “Brazilian bombshell” of an earlier era, dancing before the weather map in high heels, ruffled pink gown, copious jewelry and vast fruited hat.
Scott, who began his career in radio before becoming a weatherman at WRCTV, an NBC affiliate in Washington, had no background in meteorology or any allied science.
“A trained gorilla could do it,” Scott said in 1975, while he was at WRC.
The only scientific asset one actually needed, he pointed out, was the telephone number of the National Weather Service.
In more than three decades with “Today,” Scott traversed the country, delivering the weather on location at county fairs, town parades and quaint byways across America, as well as from NBC’S studios in New York.
A frequent guest on latenight TV, he was a spokesperson for a range of charitable causes and a commercial pitchman with wide television exposure — too wide, some critics maintained. “A huckster for all seasons,” The New York Times called him in 1987.
Scott’s on-screen persona — by his own account little different from his offscreen persona — divided viewers.
In January 1989, the country’s new first lady, Barbara Bush, broke ranks from the inaugural parade for her husband, George H.W. Bush, to dart over to Scott, broadcasting from the sidelines, and plant an impromptu kiss on his cheek.
“I don’t know Willard
Scott,” Bush explained afterward. “I just love that face.”
Then again, as The Boston Globe reported in 1975, there was this incident, from Scott’s days at WRC: “He was pushing a shopping cart in a Virginia supermarket recently when a little old lady charged by and smacked him with her umbrella. ‘I can’t stand you,’ she said.”
Scott was the author of several books, including “Willard Scott’s Down Home Stories” (1984) and “Willard Scott’s All-american Cookbook” (1986).
For all its burlesque jocularity, Scott asserted, his job was no less taxing as a result. “Everything I do looks like it just falls into place,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “Part of what I do is make it fall into place. You have to work at being a buffoon.”