Words have lost much of their impact these days. The word "extreme" was one of the first to go. At one time, it meant something serious or overpowering. Then it got taken over by marketers, truncated to "Xtreme" and applied to a flavor of Mountain Dew that absolutely nobody asked for.
"Epic" came in to fill the void left with the watering-down of "extreme", but it sadly fell to the hyperbolist hordes as well. It used to mean something like Beowulf and slaying dragons, then it went on to describing something very impressive like pulling off a 1200 on the drop from the helicopter on the drop to snowboard down the Matterhorn, but then in the span of about a week it went from that to celebrating the "epic achievement" of eating an entire bag of Doritos in one sitting. Dude, that's sooo epic!
"Passion" used to mean an intense, almost overwhelming desire. Now every unoriginal job seeker has "I'm passionate about synergistic cross-contextual gerbil herding" or some other such nonsense on their résumé. Let's be clear: I'm passionate about my wife; that means I love her intensely and I couldn't live without her. I'm passionate about flying: I love it intensely and I couldn't live without it (mainly because I'd starve, although at this point it might take a year or two). No one is "passionate" about gerbil herding; at best they might be vaguely interested in it and frankly not all that good at it.
The word "legend" gets thrown around in the same way, but in this case, Dick Goddard was an actual legend of the old school meaning. He passed away yesterday at the age of 89. Unless you're from the Cleveland, Ohio area, that probably doesn't mean a lot to you. Around Cleveland, though, he's a legend for many reasons.
First, he was a TV meteorologist in Cleveland for over 51 years, making his career longer than anyone—including the Weather Channel. His career was so long that when he was in college, weather satellites didn't even exist! The first successful weather satellite would launch a month before he graduated from Kent State in 1960. By the time he retired in late 2016, he had seen forecasting go from static, laboriously-crafted, hand-drawn paper maps to real-time interactive Ultra-HD animations.
Although he and I never met, he was a small ripple in the cosmic current that led to me becoming a pilot. When I was a child, there was no cable TV yet. Cities generally had their own NBC, ABC, and CBS affiliate stations plus a few truly local stations. The network affiliate stations played content provided by their affiliates most of the day, but there were several hours that the local station provided their own programming.
This included the local news. The news hour was much less bland, sterilized, and standardized than it is today. Every city had its own specific flavor to its journalism, and the nightly news teams themselves had different characters. TV personalities back then who delivered the news, sports, and weather weren't interchangeable, generic talking heads whose names you don't bother to remember because they'll only be around until someone cheaper graduates from broadcasting school, they were interesting individuals.
If you want to see a young George Carlin in a suit and tie give three examples of what I'm talking about (plus several mock commercials), watch this video. You can even see an early Al Sleet, before Carlin added one of his funniest lines ever ("Tonight's forecast: dark. Continued mostly dark tonight, turning to widely scattered light in the morning."):
Dick Goddard, even by those standards, had a clear personality. He was a sincere, direct, intelligent soul. Long before animal activism was a thing, at the end of his segment he would sometimes feature dogs, cats, or other animals that were in the local shelter looking for a forever home. (When Ohio recently implemented stronger anti-animal abuse laws, it named the bill "Goddard's Law".)
Other times, he would give mini-classes on air during his weather report. Sometimes it would be something as simple as explaining what an Alberta Clipper is while blaming it for the frigid cold to come. Or it could be simply explaining the difference between "partly cloudy" and "partly sunny". (Partly cloudy means more sun than clouds, and vice-versa. Pretty basic stuff, but I thought it was cool technical weather arcana back when I was 10 or so.) He not only loved the weather, he loved making you love it too. (A few years ago, I found a copy of his book Six Inches of Partly Cloudy: Cleveland's Legendary TV Meteorologist Takes on Everything--and More and devoured it in one day because his enthusiasm is still there.)
He helped kindle my life-long interest in the weather and a connection with what was going on up in the sky. Observing the atmosphere for so long made me want to swim in it, so it was inevitable that I would become a pilot someday. I didn't know when, and I didn't know how, but I knew that I would.
Even though we never met, he was a part of that. I'm sad that we never met because there was a yearly opportunity to do so. He created the Woollybear Festival, a one-day town fair in Vermilion, a pretty little place only about 15 minutes away from me. Each fall, I said I wanted to go, yet each year, when the day came, I said I'd do it next year instead. Now he won't be there next year except in our hearts and the chance to meet him is gone forever.
So do the thing you want to do while you can; see the people you want to spend time with now because there will inevitably come a day when you can't.
I'll close with this video that sums up the man and why he is such a legend in only two minutes:
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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.
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