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Crazy for the weather
| Sunday, Mar 12 2006 10:40 PM
Last Updated: Wednesday, Sep 17 2008 7:07 AM
If you like the slightly geeky, science-guy type to deliver your nightly weather report, Lloyd Lindsay Young is probably not your cup of proper English tea.
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Young is serious about the weather, but he wants to make it fun. Just watch (possibly with mouth agape) as he turns in profile to his old friend the camera, sets his feet, raises his arms for effect, and unleashes a booming baritone that sounds like it's coming from deep inside the barrel of a cannon:
"HELLOOOOOOOO, BAKERSFIELD!"
Young, the father of former Bakersfield weatherman George Lindsay Young, has been the weather guy on Channel 23 for only about five months. But the Los Angeles native has predicted rain, snow, sleet and fair skies for tens of millions of listeners in his long career, a broadcasting adventure in itself that took him from 100-watt KDOL radio in Mojave (Young jokes that he has light bulbs that are more powerful) to the No. 1 television market in the country.
"It's been a long road, and a wonderful journey," Young says during an interview inside his "Weather Lab" at the KERO offices.
"I feel like I've come full circle," he says in the very same baritone his fans hear at 5, 6 and 11 p.m. on Channel 23, and also on KGO radio in the San Francisco Bay Area.
As a kid, Young was a weather junkie. And from a young age, he knew he wanted to be a rock 'n' roll disc jockey.
After studying broadcasting at L.A. City College, Young's first "professional" gig came at the tiny Mojave station in 1961, an era when the restroom facilities consisted of an outhouse where rattlesnakes sometimes hid to get out of the sun.
"So I go to the program director and say, 'I notice on the log it's time for the news. Where's the wire?'" Young recalls. "And he hands me the L.A. Times and says, 'Here, read this.'"
Young even remembers the first record he ever played on the radio, "Sad Movies (Make Me Cry)," by Sue Thompson. Eventually, renting a room at the Quiet Sleep Motel had the fledgling broadcaster looking for something better.
He found it when KWAC Radio in Bakersfield offered him the all-night slot.
"Oh, I was thrilled," he remembers. "I was making $80 a week right down there on Chester Avenue."
Sometimes the station would open its lobby and teenage bobby-soxers would dance to the hits Young spun on the turntables.
His work in Bakersfield led to an evening shift at KORK in Las Vegas, and later a rock-jock shift in Tucson, Ariz., where Young was assigned the name Jack Jackson.
"The boss came in one day and said, 'Jack, I mean Lloyd, I've got bad news for you,'" Young recalls. "'We've gone broke. We're closing.'"
Young came back to Los Angeles, jobless. He called Ed Hopple, the owner of KWAC in Bakersfield to ask for his old job back, but Hopple only had a weekend shift available.
"I would take the 3 a.m. Greyhound Bus from Hollywood to Bakersfield, work 6 a.m. to noon, stay overnight in a motel, work the following day, then take the bus home," Young remembers. "How's that for wanting it bad?"
Eventually he graduated to an evening shift, which allowed him to move back to Bakersfield. Then in 1963, he went on a blind double-date with a local girl.
They hit it off, and Young proposed.
But the life of a radio jock is rarely constant. Less than two weeks before the wedding, the station play list was changed to what was then called a "negro" format.
"I obviously didn't fit the bill, so I frantically started sending tapes out," he says.
Lloyd and Barbara Young married anyway, job or no job, and embarked on a "business honeymoon," with stops at radio stations in Monterey, Petaluma and elsewhere. A job offer came a week later, from KXLF in Butte, Mont.
"One day in mid-November, we went into the movie theater at about 7 o'clock in the evening. It was maybe 45 degrees," Young recalls. "We came out, maybe five hours later ... it was 14 degrees with a foot of snow on the ground and blizzard conditions. You couldn't see across the street.
"The wind-chill factor was about 15 below," he continues. "Now this is a Bakersfield girl and an L.A. boy -- and my wife stood in the middle of the street and cried her eyes out."
Eighty-five audition tapes later, Young graduated to a bigger market at KMOR in Salt Lake City. Three years later, it was Tucson Part II. Then it was back to KWAC for Bakersfield, Part III.
Eventually, they went back to Salt Lake where Young started reading the news and working as a producer and production director. Then a friend suggested he get into TV. Young dove in head-first.
He learned about an opening at KIFI in Idaho Falls, Idaho and drove there with Barbara on his day off.
"I did a live audition for them," he recalls. "I went on the air with no television experience.
"Based on my radio experience and the audition, bingo! They hired me to do the weather," he says. "That was 1971."
The weatherman who would come to be known for his voice and his zany shtick learned to walk during those six years in Idaho.
"I did everything there, not just the weather," he recalls. "I mean I took the Scouts through the station, I did commercials, I jumped into a vat of Jell-O to get attention."
After six years, he moved the family to Evansville, Ind., where he was thrown in the river, wearing full suit and tie, by "rednecks;" was kicked "right in the wrong possible place" by a donkey during a donkey baseball game; and contracted pneumonia after being invited to mud wrestle two women in ice-cold mud in Owensboro, Ky.
In the early 1980s, Young received a call from the general manager of KGO television in San Francisco.
"He said, 'We want to hire you,'" Young recalls. "I thought it was a joke."
It was no joke. Young had made the big time.
In San Francisco, Young blossomed, but a dispute with another weatherman at KGO caused a showdown and Young was let go. But by then, he was like a massive weather front moving east. There was no stopping him.
"A couple of months later, my agent called me and said, 'Lloyd, you're going to New York,'" Young recalls. "I said, 'You're kidding.'"
In 1983, the now veteran weathercaster started at WOR television (now WWOR), right in the heart of Manhattan, with a six-figure salary.
Lloyd Lindsay Young had arrived.
"WOR is what is known as a superstation, No. 1 in the nation," says Lloyd's son George.
Not only was it carried on scores of cable channels, WOR was broadcast via satellite south to Mexico, north to Alaska and beyond.
"He made a huge splash in New York," George said from his home in San Diego. "I grew up in a household with a famous dad."
They stayed in New York for 12 years, where Lloyd also did radio and movies, including a cameo in "Working Girl," starring Harrison Ford and Melanie Griffith.
Over the years, the style of the TV weathercaster began to trend toward meteorologists and other academic types. The routine Young had developed over more than two decades was beginning to seem "old school" and a bit hokey to some.
Young said he was thrilled when he received a call last year to come back to Bakersfield. The management at 23 was looking for something different--not "a slice from the same white loaf," says General Manager Craig Jahelka.
"We weren't looking for the safe choice," Jahelka says. "People either love Lloyd--and I mean really love him-- or not. Whatever he's doing, it's working."
"He livens things up, which is exactly what we were looking for," adds Todd Karli, Channel 23's news director and evening anchor. "He's going to bring something different to the newscast every night."
Different includes a new weather pointer supplied each night by a devoted fan. Some of the weirdest examples have included the leg of a mannequin, complete with nylon stocking and high-heeled pump; a 20-foot-long icicle in Idaho and a live piglet that urinated on Young's arm during one memorable weathercast.
Asked about his big voice, Lloyd calls it "a God-given thing.
"I can play you tapes from the '60s when I was kind of squeaky and breathy. It's a combination of a God-given thing and practice. And maturity."
Despite the shtick, most of what you see on the air is just him -- larger-than-life, big-voiced Lloyd, wanting nothing more than to pull viewers into the studio with him.
"Most people are stunned to find that my dad is exactly the same guy you see on the air," George says. "This hyperactive, strange guy they see on TV ... really, that's who he is.
"You can love him or hate him," George says. "But in the end, you've got to watch him."