Why We’ll Miss Dick Goddard

In the keepsake book from my Holy Cross School reunion, one of my classmates wrote this as her most vivid memory: “Dick Goddard teaching us about the weather in the church basement. Ha ha.“ Not sure what the “ha ha” was about, but I remember how impressed we all were to be in the presence of a TV star. None of this would be noteworthy, of course, except that it happened nearly 52 years ago. Goddard already was a Cleveland icon — the soft-spoken, quirky but authoritative weather guy on what was then KYW-TV3. That was before he moved to WJW-TV8, where he added animal advocacy to his repertoire and where he will say goodbye this month. Thus ends 55 years on the air predicting everything from blistering heat to bone-chilling cold, from lake-effect snow to midsummer storms — always with a steady drizzle of good humor. No matter how uncertain the forecast, we could always count on him. I ran into him at the Cleveland Magazine Most Interesting People Party in 2007 when he was 76 — or, as he put it, “532 dog years or 24 degrees Celsius.” I said I was amazed he had never made the MIP list before. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s like having a baseball not signed by Bob Feller.”