Longtime Kan. weatherman reflects on changes

AP Photo.

By CLARA KILBOURN

The Hutchinson News

HUTCHINSON, Kan. (AP) -- His blue eyes twinkle when Dale Collins compares his 40-year career as a weatherman to today's 10 p.m. fellows who depend on radar and Doppler.

"We looked up in the sky, watched the stars and clouds and took observations," he said.

Forecasters drew their own maps and plotted what was coming based on visual sightings. He's still "like an old horse hooked to a fire engine," when it comes to watching the sky.

At Kingman Drug, where he stops in twice daily for coffee, longtime clerk Ann Smith, 70, called Collins "a very intelligent man."

"We always ask him about the weather and kid him about which TV forecaster is his favorite," she said. "He's well known in the community and would do anything for anybody."

Collins, 96, trained as a forecaster while he was in the Army. Among his assignments with the U.S. Weather Bureau were the eight-state Western Region, Montana to the Pacific Coast, and in Syracuse, N.Y., where real snowstorms come in over the Great Lakes.

Based on his decades of experience, Collins thinks today's forecasters get a bit carried away, even with thunderstorms of the garden variety.

"If you've got thunder, you've got lightning," he said. "Action in progress. When it's spotty, it can go either way."

His group released weather balloons with tiny lighted candles that let them predict the weather based on wind speed and direction. Encoded teletypes from ships delivered information from over the oceans.

Even with today's technology, Collins thinks that beyond three days, it's a 50-50 guessing game. Scattered showers on radar mean just that. "You can look out and it's raining cats and dogs or you're not getting a drop."

He adheres to the validity of sunspots and he's not worried about melting icebergs.

"We had the ice age several thousand years ago with icebergs in Kansas and it melted," he said. "We've just had two cooler-than-normal summers and a couple of cold winters."

Some people say breaking up the sod made the weather different, but that's still a guess, "nothing they can put their finger on."

He remembers the history of an 1834 volcano that blew up in the southwest Pacific, caused so much dust around the world it served as a solar insulation. There was no summer that year; crops didn't grow and people starved.

Even though it's been ages ago, he still gets ribbed about being a forecaster.

"Everybody always asks me what's going to happen next week," he said. "All you can do is tell them what could happen, what it looks like might happen."

Continuing with the banter that locals heap on him, Collins said that once a weatherman gets used to lying, he can't stop, "just like a good lawyer."

"You try to highlight your good ones and downplay your bad ones," he said. He went on to say there's no need to try to please everyone. It's just like farmers. Some want rain for their planting while their neighbor doesn't want rain because he's haying.

Turning serious, Collins compared air to water. While water goes downstream, air moves up and down and sideways, follows the Adiabatic stream. As he surveys the magnitude of the weather, he doesn't discount the grandeur of the Creation.

"You gotta believe in something," he said.