CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) — Meteorologist Tom Skilling is retiring after more than four decades at Channel 9. In a conversation with WBBM, he said that career all got started with a letter he wrote as a teenager to a suburban radio station.
“I’m told it was an eight-page letter with the audacity to suggest that I would do a better forecast for Aurora than what they were getting from Chicago,” he said.
Skilling, at age 14, had heard the forecasts being read on WKKD radio in suburban Aurora — and thought they could be done better. That letter led to a job that Skilling held during his years at West Aurora High School.
“I’d hang out at the radio station on the weekends and cut the grass and wash the windows,” he said. “They’d pop me on the FM, but always the love of weather and the weather program that I did was my first passion.”
The love of weather that Skilling developed as a kid led him to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to study both meteorology and journalism. After graduation he moved to Jacksonville, Fla., for his first TV gig. The Midwest was home, though, and Skilling got back here for a TV job in Milwaukee, where he delivered the weather alongside a puppet named “Albert the Alleycat,” which his bosses once tried to get rid of.
“They announced to the public that the puppet was going back to the kids show, and the mail started coming in,” said Skilling. “There were mail bags stacked in the news director’s office from the floor to the ceiling. I remember one of the letters said, ‘If you take that puppet off the weather show, that’s like killing my family pet.’”
The puppet stayed, but in 1978 Skilling moved on to Channel 9 — just ahead of the blizzard of 1979, which drove Mayor Michael Bilandic out of office.
“We had our first blizzard on Dec. 1, and we had snow storms every two weeks. And he was out saying, ‘Oh, look at this, the city’s working just like it always does,’ and we all knew: No it isn’t.”
Over the course of his 45 years on the air at Channel 9, Skilling became the trusted voice Chicago would turn to during many winter weather events, including the 2011 blizzard that left drivers stranded on DuSable Lake Shore Drive.
“I talked to a woman, I said, ‘How’d you get stuck out there in the middle of a 70-mile-an-hour wind? How was it that you were on the drive?’” he recalled. “She said, ‘Well, you know, we knew the storm was coming. We had heard the warnings, so we left work early, but we didn’t expect a CTA articulated bus to jackknife and stop the traffic flow.’ And therefore, people were stuck.”
Now, after more than four decades of telling Chicagoland about droughts, storms, tornadoes and blizzards, Skilling is stepping down and moving into what he described as “uncharted territory.”
“I’ve worked since I was a teenager,” said Skilling, who turns 72 on Feb. 20.
Even though his time at Channel 9 is coming to an end, Skilling said his love of weather is “probably more intense now than it was when I was a little kid.”
He’ll leave behind an entire city that’s grateful for his passion.
“I should thank everybody,” Skilling said. “I have been blessed with an amazing audience. I’ll tell you: what an honor.”
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