Larry Green’s forecast for Alabama: “hot and rainy” with his days full of sunshine.
After almost 30 years as a television weathercaster in Denver, Green is hanging up his Doppler and retiring to revel in the sweet allure of the South.
“Right now,” he said recently on the high-tech weather set at KCNC-Channel 4, “I’m kind of fascinated with the South – the history, the people, the accents – all that kind of stuff is really pretty interesting to me. I really like what’s going on down there.”
The fact that he’ll be living on the Gulf Coast within a few miles of his fishing buddy and former Channel 4 colleague Bill Stuart is another draw.
Retired since 2003, Stuart is waiting for Green, his perfect foil, with open arms. “I guess he was the straight man,” Stuart said from his home in Alabama. “There’s a saying in television that sincerity is easy, once you learn to fake it. But Larry is Larry. What you see is what you get.”
Even the opposition respected him. “He has always been a great competitor in the 15 years I’ve been in the market,” said Mike Nelson of KMGH- Channel 7. “But more than that he’s a really nice guy, and in this business that’s always a nice thing to find.”
Green will rhapsodize about his last cumulus mass and downslope wind on the 4 o’clock newscast Friday, which coincides with the arrival at Channel 4 of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and the demise of the station’s 4 p.m. newscast. Beginning next Monday, Channel 4 realigns its news team with anchors Molly Hughes and Jim Benemann joined by longtime Channel 4 anchor and wit Ed Greene on weather and Vic Lombardi doing sports.
The retirement isn’t sudden. Green, 57, who started talking about the local weather at KMGH-Channel 7 in 1977, said, “I’ve been thinking about it for four or five years. There were a couple of things that prompted it. First of all, the 4 o’clock show (which he anchored with Stephanie Riggs) that we put on the air here in ’82 is going to end.
“My wife, Amy, has a business in Alabama that’s doing pretty well, so we’re going to give that a little attention.”
When he landed in Denver from Tucson, Green’s main weather rivals were Leon “Stormy” Rottman at what was then KBTV-Channel 9 and Charles Merlin Uppenhour at Channel 4. “I came in one person after Warren Chandler at Channel 7,” he recalled, which tripped a memory of one of local TV’s most unforgettable oddballs. “Remember Dewey Hopper?,” Green asked.
Hopper, the weatherman at Channel 7, departed town after less than one bizarre year. “He self-destructed so badly I was a hero over there. I saw him (on the air) one time. He came in in a gorilla suit one night! I couldn’t believe management over there would let him do it.”
Green made the move to Channel 4 in 1982. “Roger (Ogden) had me come over as a utility infielder, doing things like Ride the Rockies, the Bolder Boulder, a telethon here and there, and to start the 4 o’clock show.”
Eventually, Green wound up doing weather, a task that has changed immensely since he started. It’s more competitive and computer-oriented. “Now, a lot of this stuff is so highly produced,” he said. “There’s no way you can deviate from things like we used to with Stuart,” known for his ability to make Green break up on the air.
Weather forecasting today is loaded with technology. It wasn’t always that way. “I didn’t draw pictures, but I drew fronts,” Green said. “There was a time before we got these computers where we either had a magnetic board where you put some numbers on it or you had little sun things. I used a magnetic board that you could also draw on because you could clean it up after each show.”
Today, stations brag that their radar is bigger than everybody else’s radar, a spitting contest Green said “has been going on for years. It’s like, ‘Ours can see a fat lady getting out of a shower.’ I think we’ve plateaued. I don’t think there are a lot of innovations coming along that will be airable.”
Though he’s exiting the forecasting biz, Green won’t lie fallow in Alabama. He plans to help his wife run her indoor sports complex, build a house on land he owns near Mobile, do some volunteering with the Salvation Army and pursue his new hobby, bird watching.
Promised his friend Stuart: “I’ll try to teach him to fish.”
Green won’t leave Colorado cold. He’s the starter for the Bolder Boulder on Memorial Day and will return to cover and ride in the Ride the Rockies bicycle tour “for the next few years.”
He also left the door open for some freelance work. “If I find a television station and I really like what they’re doing, I might call them and say, ‘If you need something, give me a call. If you’ve got a live truck down here with nobody to front it, I’ll stand in front of a camera.’ I doubt that will happen.”
One thing he won’t do is look back at Denver weather. “Maybe it was silly and horsing around, but there’s no room for that kind of thing now. I’ll miss that but that’s past tense.”
He has his opinions on his Denver forecasting rivals but he’ll pack them with his bags. “Ask me that question later on. All in all, the business in this town is pretty good.”
Staff writer Dick Kreck can be reached at 303-820-1456 or dkreck@denverpost.com.
