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H. Allen Smith's Weather Forecasts1

H. Allen Smith credits Floyd Taylor with starting humorous weather forecast writing who when he was told to write a paragraph about the weather, glanced out the window at golden sunshine and wrote: Weather Story: This would be a nice day to have off. Floyd Taylor then tossed the line to Elmer Roessner on the city desk who said... let's use it and they did and that was the beginning. Here is a weather forecast H. Allen Smith wrote while working at the New York World-Telegram.  The forecast was published sometime between 1936 to 1941, the dates H. Allen Smith worked at the New York World-Telegram:
 
THROUGH THE YEARS TO THE WEATHER
   One fine, spring day in 1850 a gentleman named James Liddy, of Watertown, N.Y., went to a county fair in his surrey. It was a lousy fair and Mr. Liddy curled himself up on the seat of his surrey and went to sleep. When he awoke he felt remarkably refreshed, and he was smitten with an idea. He went home and forthwith invented the first bedsprings known to man.

   Today is a nice but cloudy day_nice to go to a county fair and sleep in a surrey seat. Tomorrow it will likely rain_a good day to stay at home and commune with Mr. Liddy's invention.

H. Allen Smith indicates an artist named Bill Pause was working with him when he was doing weather stories at the New York World-Telegram who dreamed up a chicken character to illustrate the weather pieces he was writing that became quite well known and that H. Allen Smith named Arpad. - back

WebPost Footnotes:
1_To Hell In A Handbasket p.324, H. Allen Smith's Autobiography.
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Version 1.0 W.A. Haugen
Last Modified: Sunday, March 02,2008, 04:41AM PST
Origination date of this page January 11, 2006.
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