I didn't know that John Coleman (founder of the Weather Channel and a lifetime of other accomplishments) lived in Las Vegas, where he died this morning (1/21/2018) at 83. I remember him from my days in Chicago, and then when I moved to San Diego. Was he well-known around town? Kinda hard to imagine him being low-key anywhere.
John Coleman was born in 1934 near El Paso and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the early 1950s, where he became the weatherman on the college radio station. He parlayed that into a similar job at a TV station in Champaign. He climbed the TV-weatherman ladder and hit the big time as the chief meteorologist for ABC affiliate WLS in Chicago, then moved in 1975 to ABC’s "Good Morning America," hosted by David Hartman, where he spent seven years.
In 1982, Coleman left “GMA” to launch the Weather Channel, TV’s first 24-hour-a-day national-weather cable network, which didn’t exactly take the TV industry by storm (pun intended). He partnered with the CEO of Landmark Communications, Frank Batten, and became the network’s president, CEO, and meteorologist. But the partnership fell apart a year later and Coleman left for jobs back in Chicago and New York. In 1983, the American Meteorological Society named him AMS Broadcast Meteorologist of the Year. He finally landed at KUSI in San Diego in 1994 at the age of 60.
Coleman was known for his moves -- dancing, spinning, high-stepping, and kicking as he pranced across the weather screens, and singing the “U” when he announced KUSI’s call letters. He was also controversial for his stance that global warming was a hoax.
Coleman stayed at KUSI through 2014 when he retired at age 80. He and his wife Linda moved to Las Vegas in May 2016, settling in Summerlin. Since he’d lived here for barely a year and a half and didn’t make any kind of splash on TV, he almost certainly kept a low-profile. No one we asked knew of him.
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Deke Castleman
Feb-15-2018
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