Radar shows with winds out of the SW why Buffalo gets hammered

 Buffalo, NY;  December 25-30, 2001  – 7-FEET OF SNOW IN 5 DAYS:

When it comes to lake effect no week stands out more to me than Christmas week 2001.   As of Monday December 24th, Christmas Eve, Buffalo hadn’t had any snow for the season, not even a trace. 

It was the first year on record the city had gone that long without a flake.  Later that night the snow started falling and when it ended Christmas Day we had around 25″ on the ground. 

We became the talk of the country and on Wednesday we found ourselves doing extra live shots for the network and other stations on the Christmas snow.  The sun was out much of the day though in Buffalo as the band drifted north into Niagara County and was hitting them hard and giving us a chance to dig out.  

By 4 a.m. Thursday though it drifted south and was back on top of us dropping snow at the rate of 3″ an hour again.  Once again we were the talk of the country (remember no real news happens during Christmas week so the networks loved it.) 

My wife and I were doing live shots for just about every network (even the financial ones) and tons of local stations around the country.   (One of the live shots she did was for a station here in Cleveland and from that came a job offer and that’s how we ended up moving to less snowy side of Lake Erie.)

My wife of CNN

The storm hit during a time in my career where in addition to anchoring WKBW’s morning show I was a fill-in weather person pushed into full time duty because the station had only one meteorologist working that week.  He handled the late shows I handled the early.  

Between live shots they asked me to a phone interview with Sam Donaldson on his national radio show.  I thought sure I can do this one from my desk where it’s warm.

As I waited his producer asked me if I could wait a minute or two, there were some new developments out of Afghanistan that morning and Sam wanted to get a quick update.  I said no problem, I’m good on time.  

I sat at my desk with my coat on trying to warm up and actually started to dose off a little as I waited.  It was then I heard Sam come on and talk about what happened with Al Quaida that morning.  Then I heard him say “joining me now with more on this is John Kosich, President of the National Institute of Military Justice.”  

Like a kid called on in class by the teacher the adrenaline rush shot through me “oh crap” I thought.  I can talk about travel bans not the Taliban.  A heartbeat later Sam recognized his mistake, corrected himself and said “I’m sorry Eugene Fidell, President of the…”  Needless to say when Sam came to me a minute or two later I was awake.

Me digging out my car 12/29/2001

When the snow ended Friday we had 84″ of it in five days.  Saturday was spent just trying to first find my car then dig it out for the third time this week.

The biggest problem with 7-feet of snow is where do you put it?  Buffalo has huge trash cans, I’d fill one up, roll it to an empty spot, dump it, then repeat the process.

Oh and if you wondered what 7-feet of snow looks like? It actually looks like three or four feet because it’s constantly packing down under it’s own weight.

We couldn’t get out of town for New Years until Sunday and even then it wasn’t easy, then as we got 20-30 miles out of town there was hardly any snow, the joy of Lake Effect.

The most awesome thing about that year was the fact that we basically had winter in a week.  We had nothing leading up to that storm, we got walloped and then we really had very little snow after it.  Maybe one or two 6″ storms but nothing huge.

Artist's interpretation of the shooting of President William McKinley September 6, 1901It was 110 years ago on September 6, 1901 that President William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, NY. It is an event that will, for me, be forever linked with 9/11.In September of 2001 I was working as an anchor in Buffalo, New York. All summer long there were festivities marking the 100th Anniversary of the great Pan American Exposition.The Expo was to be a celebration of all things great about the Electric City highlighted by the Electric Tower, a magnificent building lit up nightly with thousands of colored bulbs and floodlights. (You'll notice the resemblance to Cleveland's own Terminal Tower built 25-years later.)The visit of President William McKinley in early September 1901 was to be the highlight of the Exposition but it quickly turned into a tragic event that would forever define the Expo and Buffalo. The date was September 6, 1901, President McKinley was greeting guests at the Expo's Temple of Music, when he was shot twice in the abdomen by anarchist Leon Czolgosz.Milburn House Delaware Avenue in Buffalo

  McKinley was taken to the nearby home of John Milburn who was head of the Exposition board.  The  house sat on Delaware Avenue in Buffalo and was literally  just around the corner from where I was living at the time 100 years later.  (It’s now a parking lot for Canisius High School where the late Tim Russert went to school.)

McKinley would lie mortally wounded in the home for the next eight days as his cabinet assembled around him.  He appeared to be recovering before taking a turn for the worse.  He died September 14th of 1901.

I had started a nine day series of stories on September 6, 2001 which were to run through the 14th.  The pieces focused on what was happening in Buffalo 100-years ago today. 

Pres. McKinley lying in state, Buffalo City Hall

  My goal was to try to capture the feel of what it must have been like in Buffalo back then, the panic, the shock, the concern having a President shot and later die in your town.

 But as hard as I tried to understand what the city was going through the reality was I just really couldn’t, afterall I wasn’t there.

That changed on Day 6 of the series,  September 11th, 2001.  

I was anchoring the morning show at WKBW-TV and learned over the ABC squawk box that there was a fire in the World Trade Center and that they were working to put up a live signal.  I looked up to see that it wasn’t up yet and at that time no network had broken in.  Seconds later the shot was up on our closed circuit feed from ABC and it was clear this wasn’t just a fire but an explosion of some sort.  Seconds after that one by one the networks broke into programming and we all know the rest.

After a long day at work my wife and I returned home that night where we remained glued to the coverage from New York.  Around 7:30 I broke away to take our dog out for a walk and as I strolled down the street  I was actually able to follow the network coverage on this warm summer night through the open windows of my neighbors who like all of us were glued to their TVs.

As I walked along eavesdropping on the neighborhood televisions it dawned on me the streets were still, there was no traffic, no one else out walking, by this time most folks were home spending the night with loved ones.  

When I got to the corner of Delaware & Lafayette I looked down to where the Milburn house once stood.  It was at that very moment that it dawned on me,  100-years ago to the very hour a President of the United States lay dying there and it was only then I realized that this, what we all were feeling the night of 9/11, was what it was like to have been alive in this city 100-years ago that night.

Returning to Ocean City, New Jersey last week brought back memories of the storm and that caused me to dig up some old pictures from October of 1991.  I follow them with the same area  today.

17th Street & Boardwalk looking South. Ocean City, NJ October 31, 1991

17th & Boardwalk, Ocean City, NJ August, 2009

The enormous Nor’easter which was actually a combination of different systems was far out to sea but it was so powerful that it pushed tides to a high not seen in some parts of Jersey since the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944.  Before it was over it would claim about a half mile of Ocean City’s boardwalk while flooding out much of the barrier island.   

17th & Boardwalk Ocean City, NJ looking north 1991

17th & Boardwalk Ocean City, August 2009.

The storm started to affect Ocean City on October 30, 1991 when under beautiful sunshine the massive system churned up the surf and prevented the high tides from adequately subsiding at low tide.  As a result each successive high tide got higher and the island began to flood. 

My parents who were staying with me at the time headed home that afternoon to Philadelphia just as the floodwater started to rise.  I was anchoring the 11 p.m. news that night and decided not to go home to Ocean City that night but to head up to Philadelphia as well.  

Satellite view of the Halloween Storm, 1991

At midnight though I suffered a blowout on the exit ramp from the Garden State Parkway to the A.C. Expressway.  There are no lights on the ramp and in the pitch dark I hastilly changed the tire. 

My first car, a victim of the '91 Storm

Because it was so dark I couldn’t tell though if I did it right.  To play it safe I returned to the flooded Ocean City and made the mistake of coming in the 9th Street Causeway.  The flooding was much deeper than I anticipated.  I jumped a curb and made it through but the damage was done.  Salt water is extremely corrosive, the rusting process starts as soon as the water hits air,  within a month my beloved Monte was dead.

The so-called Halloween Storm was the first of three “100-Year Storms” that we would see in Ocean City over the next 18-months. 

The newly rebuilt Ocean City boardwalk getting it's first test in December, 1992 storm.

The boardwalk was rebuilt but as you can see by the pictures above it was moved out a few feet from the bulkhead so until the beach was rebuilt the waves hitting the bulkhead at high tide could go straight up and not hit the boards.

Through beach replenishment the once 15-foot drop from the boardwalk to the sand below was eliminated, dunes eventually took shape and what was once the place to go to watch a storm in Ocean City became a distant memory.

17th Street looking North

Same view 19 years later

Here’s a story I did in September of 1992 when Tropical Storm Danielle threatened the coast.

17th Street & Boardwalk December, 1992

John Kosich & Merv Griffin; June, 1993

Around the Fourth of July each year I usually think of my time working at the Jersey Shore and the man who loved to make Independence Day a spectacular, Merv Griffin.  

Merv’s Birthday was July 6th so he always made an extended celebration of the holiday.

One of my regrets was not having a forum like this a few years ago when the legendary entertainer died of prostate cancer.  I was on vacation at the time of Merv’s death and by the time I got back to work any chance to do a television obit using my old interviews was past.

I got to know Merv while working in Atlantic City.  The legendary talk show host and creator of Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy was the owner of Resorts Hotel & Casino at the time.  One  the first things I was told when I started at WMGM-TV was Merv watches.

I first saw the advantage of that two months into the job when Merv appeared before the Casino Control Commission in August of 1990 to get approval for a debt restructuring plan tied to the casino’s financial troubles.  The room was filled with reporters from Philly and New York and as the hearing broke they stayed back as I asked him if he’d talk, he said sure.

Within seconds of his first answer the other microphones came flying in.  As he finished his answer he said to me  you’re probably going to ask me next about… (some complicated thing over my head related to the bankruptcy). Truth be told I wasn’t but acted like I was and he preceded to give me a couple of great soundbites.  He knew I was green but rather than exploit it he helped me and I never forgot that.

Merv Griffin, Jack Sheldon, John Kosich

Merv Griffin’s ties to Atlantic City ran deep beginning back with his days playing the Steel Pier as a singer with the Freddy Martin Band.  He was always looking to recreate a little of that magic at Resorts starting with his Coconut Ballroom 4th of July shows. 

Each year he and Jack Sheldon would headline a week of shows with additional guests like Rosemary Clooney.  This wasn’t a show where you watched but participated, dancing at the foot of the stage.  I had the chance to take in a number of these shows in the early 90′s and they were experiences I’ll never forget.

The success of that led Merv to lament that there was no real successor to Guy Lombardo’s New Year’s Eve shows.  What he was seeing on TV each New Year’s Eve were specials geared more for the Top 40 crowd who in his mind were probably out at the clubs anyway.  So he decided to begin putting on his own nationally televised New Year’s Eve show from Resorts.

He struck a partnership with the other casinos to borrow their headliners for an hour to have them perform and in turn he gave his competing casinos and the city itself national exposure.

Merv sold his share of Resorts in the late 90′s and focused his attention at home in Los Angeles where he owned the Beverly Hilton.   This was Atlantic City’s loss, the world’s loss came in August of 2007 when Merv Griffin died at the age of 82.

Below is the raw tape of one of the interviews I did with Merv prior to one of his 4th of July shows – it was always a favorite of mine because  Jack Sheldon pops in for a cameo in the middle of it.

Independence Hall, Philadelphia

Growing up in Philadelphia the Fourth of July is and has always been one of my favorite holidays.  What our Founding Fathers achieved 235 years ago is nothing short of miraculous.

That’s why one of my favorite stories of all time was one we shot in only about a half hour as my photographer and I were literally passing through Philadelphia on our way back to Buffalo from another story we were on.

It was July 3rd, 2001 and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see what people  in the shadow of Independence Hall, on the eve of Independence Day, actually knew about their founding fathers.  It aired the next day, July 4th, on WKBW-TV (ABC) in Buffalo, NY.  and here it is…

My Dad, Francis Kosich in the Navy, 1947

The month of June in Ohio is Father’s Day month, a month the state hopes to encourage fathers to embrace the important parenthood role they play by supplying the emotional and financial support their children need.

I’m happy another Father’s Day comes with my Dad still around to celebrate it with this year.

In honor of Father’s Day I wanted to post the one song that says thank you Dad better than most, Eddie Fisher’s “Oh My Papa.”

The 1953 single reached #1 on the charts.  This particular version of it was from when I worked in Atlantic City and Eddie was performing at Trump Plaza in March of 1992.

The South Philadelphia born Fisher sold millions of records in his career and was married to Debbie Reynolds, Elizabeth Taylor and Connie Stevens.

He is the father of actresses Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) and Joely Fisher (sitcom Ellen.)  This marks the first Father’s Day since his passing in September, 2010.

Happy Father’s Day!

He was the voice of the Phillies, the voice of NFL Films, the voice of Campbell’s Soup…  He was quite simply THE VOICE.

Growing up in Northeast Philadelphia Harry was  summer.   Take a walk around our block of rowhomes on a hot August night and it was Harry’s voice you heard in the background on the radio as parents sat on their front steps watching their kids play, the women talking, the men listening to the Phillies game, maybe drinking a cold Schmidt’s or Ortlieb’s.

As a kid I wanted to be the next Harry Kalas.  We’d play stickball or wiffleball and I’d call the games as we played them, trying my best to do it just like Harry would.  Every hit was “a long drive” and every homerun was “outta here.”

When I was in sixth grade at St. Martha’s in Philadelphia I came across a book about how to be a play by play announcer and I thought this is it, that’s what I’m going to do.  So I wrote to Harry Kalas for advice, he wrote back, I wrote him with more questions, he wrote me with more answers.  Long story short it was a correspondence that would go back and forth for the next  31 years.

In a quick search through old boxes I’ve come across a handful of those letters like the one above when I wrote Harry in High School to say that I had chosen to go to Temple University or this one below,  just a quick thank you in response to the congrats I had sent him on his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2002.

Some years Harry and I would  write to each other only at Christmas time but I always looked forward to his cards.  When I got his card this year he wrote in there that he couldn’t believe how big my son was getting and how he’s turning into quite the young man.  I thought you know what I’m going to set that aside for my son to have one day.  As I looked at it today I’m glad I did. 

Harry Kalas & John Kosich

The above picture was taken when I worked in Buffalo and the Phillies were playing in Toronto and we made arrangements to get together before a game, I wish I had done it more.

Two years ago when the Phillies came to Cleveland my bosses were going to let me take a break from hard news one night to do a profile piece with Harry on his Hall of Fame career.  Unfortunately the week the Phillies came to town was the week the Jessie Davis story broke.  (She was the missing woman who was 9-months pregnant, later discovered murdered by her cop boyfriend.)  The search for Jessie became national news and trumped fluff, my Harry piece was the casualty, we never got to do it and today I’m sad about that.

There have been two professionals in this business who didn’t know me from Adam but took an interest in me and remained there with encouragement and support.  Harry Kalas was one ( Dave Roberts of WPVI was the other) and I never passed on the opportunity to let Harry know how thankful I was to him for that.

A few years back the phone rings at the house and my wife answers.  She hands me the phone and says ”it’s for you…  it sounds like the voice of God.”  She was close, it was Harry.   He may have had God’s voice but now God has his.  We’re just thankful for the time he shared it with us.

This is the piece I did on Harry’s passing 4/13/2009 WEWS-TV Cleveland:

With St. Patrick’s Day almost upon us here’s one from the archives looking back at some of the misperceptions surrounding St. Patrick, Ireland and the Irish.   Do you know where St. Patrick was born?  What the official color of Ireland is?  How about the national symbol?  I put this piece together in Buffalo back in 2001.

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame from Newschopper 5

 In honor of Monday’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony in New York (remember next year the festivities come back to Cleveland) I wanted to point out something that alot of people don’t realize about the I.M. Pei designed building, the fact that the area in front of the Hall is designed to look like a record player. 

I’ll be honest with you for more than 3 years I flew over the Rock Hall every day taking off and landing in Newschopper 5 from the adjacent Burke Lakefront Airport and I could not see it. 

Then one day we were flying over the Hall after it snowed and it hit me like a ton of bricks, luckilly I had my camera with me that day.  (If it doesn’t hit you I threw in a couple of things to look for.)