Raining Buckets On A Sunny Day

One bright and sunny Summer day while Gary Allyn and I were working the afternoon shift on KONO (he in the booth and I on the news desk) one of the strangest and most embarrassing events in my career happened.

In those days–the late 50's and early 60's–we did five minutes of news just before the top of every hour. The newscast always ended with the weather.

On this particular day, I finished the news and went into the weather forecast, which always ended with the current weather conditions. The news desk was separated from the booth by a huge plate glass window that allowed the newsman to look into the booth to see the clock and the weather gauges.

So there I am looking up at those instruments and giving the forecast, when all of a sudden, the rain gauge begins clicking off tenths of inches of rain. CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, CLICK till in nothing flat, the gauge registered a couple of inches of rain while still CLICKING away.

I couldn't believe it! A gully-washer frog strangler rain storm apparently had just cropped up. What was I to do? It was totally unexpected!

The forecast had no mention of rain. But man, that rain gauge was humming.

Sure enough...I bit, and said something like, "A tremendous rainstorm has just developed over our KONO studios, and it's already dumped over 2 inches of rain in a matter of minutes."

In my peripheral vision I could tell that Gary Allyn was absolutely dumbfounded. However, because the newscast length was determined by the time tone that happened at the top of the hour–No Matter What, I kept going and "nailed" the finish.

Gary kept it together just long enough to get his hour started off perfectly with another top 40 record. He immediately spoke to me over the intercom, "What the hell are you talking about? It's not raining. It's clear as a bell out there. "

He was right. It was a perfect San Antonio Summer afternoon–not a cloud in the sky.

What happened that made the rain gauge go bonkers?

Apparently, that darn thing had been acting up a bit, so without telling anyone, the engineers had gone up onto the roof to clean it out by running water into it. You can imagine how fast that rain gauge was going.

Just goes to show...you can't trust those doggone engineers.

Guess I'll never live that one down.

Tom Ellis

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