Here’s how long Dick Goddard has been doing the weather.
When I was in sixth grade, he came to my school and gave a presentation.
Seriously. Sixth grade. Russell Elementary School in Russell Township, just across the line from Chagrin Falls. Creaky old gymnasium with an elevated stage behind one end of the court.
A TV star in person! We were fired up.
Many Hunter’s Moons later, long after I had joined him in the adult demographics, I got to know Dick fairly well.
I first wrote about him in the late 1970s while working for the Wooster Daily Record. In my early years at the Beacon, while regularly covering local TV, I dealt with him often.
I sat at his table when one of his former news anchors, Robin Swoboda, got married in San Diego.
In 1994, while working on a long personality profile of Goddard for the late, great Sunday Beacon Magazine, I spent several hours with him at his old house in Westlake.
Approaching the house, I quickly noticed something odd — something that is the perfect metaphor for the difference between the TV Goddard and the real-life Goddard.
At the rear entrance, on a sliding glass door between his patio and his kitchen, was an ominous hand-lettered sign:
“DANGER! LIVE SNAKES.”
Peer through the glass and you saw a speckled cobra poised to strike.
Yikes!
I feared the guy’s fascination with animals had gotten out of hand.
But things were not as they seemed. The snake was dead. Stuffed. The sign was merely a low-cost security system.
He created the display the previous year after someone attempted to break into his house. Not sure how much credit to give the snake, but Goddard didn’t have any trouble after that.
In other words, things that look one way from the outside can look radically different from the inside.
Here’s what most people don’t know about the most famous Northeast Ohio TV personality in the history of the medium: Off-camera, Goddard has a real edge.
The Green native has made his megabucks as your friendly ol’ neighbor, chatting over the fence, an ever-mellow fellow serenely passing along his meteorological expertise. But in real life, he has a wicked sense of humor, an unexpected but endearing irreverence and, most surprising of all, a sizeable vein of cynicism.
One of the reasons he is so enamored with animals may be that his regard for humans is roughly equal to Mark Twain’s. With a bow toward Twain, Goddard identified himself that day as “an interdenominational skeptic.”
Give a dog a home, he said, and the dog is eternally grateful. But humans? “The more you do for somebody, the more they expect.”
At the time, he was a self-proclaimed mole who routinely stayed up until 3 or 4 in the morning, usually watching ESPN.
Here’s another thing that wasn’t exactly emphasized at his Woollybear Festivals: Goddard’s steady companion for 24 years was a former Playboy model.
Julie Cashel — Julie-Ann, as she called herself — was a sweet, affectionate, extremely soft-spoken woman whose physical attributes, even decades after posing, made it obvious why both Goddard and Playboy were intrigued.
They met soon after she landed a TV weather job on the West Coast. A Cleveland native who knew virtually nothing about weather, she phoned Goddard and asked to visit the station to discuss highs and lows. Let’s just say Dick succeeded in prolonging the conversation.
He never popped the question, but they were closer than many married couples. As the Beacon’s Rich Heldenfels noted last week in his front-page piece about Goddard’s upcoming retirement, Julie’s death in 1996, paired with the death of his mother, Doris, a mere 12 hours later, threw Goddard into a cosmic funk.
His one constant has been the weather. Goddard and his weather have ruled the airwaves. When it came to the all-important ratings, other forecasters must have felt as if they were playing in the Developmental League against LeBron James.
In the hallways of WJW (Channel 8), he has long been referred to as “The Franchise.”
National researchers said no other personality in any Top 25 market matched Goddard’s popularity. One executive told me his polling found that an astonishing 81 percent of viewers said Goddard is one of their “personal favorites,” adding, “George Washington wouldn’t have gotten that number when he was president.”
But now it’s time for Dick to go. Past time, truth be told. (The Dick Goddard I know seems constitutionally incapable of telling a lie, so I’m following suit.)
Many viewers will remember him only as the kindly old uncle dispensing his forecasts and handing out Woollybear stickers to everyone in sight. I will remember him as a fellow who is far edgier, far more complex and far more interesting.
I hope you will, too.
Bob Dyer can be reached at 330-996-3580 or bdyer@thebeaconjournal.com. He also is on Facebook at www.facebook.com/bob.dyer.31