Scott’s colleagues approved of his modus operandi. Scott’s early weeks at “Today,” he later recalled, were “touch and go.”īut by 1987, The Times reported, “his tenure there” was “credited with helping to catapult the show past ‘Good Morning America’ into first place in the breakfast-time sweepstakes.” Scott was hired by “Today,” he supplanted the meteorologist Bob Ryan, who held a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s in atmospheric science and had previously worked as a cloud physicist. There, his exploits included emerging from a manhole one Groundhog Day dressed as an astoundingly large groundhog. In 1967, he started doing the weather on WRC-TV. In the early ’60s, on the strength of his Bozo, McDonald’s asked him to develop a clown character to be used in its advertising. Scott also played the title character on “Bozo the Clown,” the WRC-TV version of a syndicated children’s show. Featuring humorous improvisation and topical satire, it won a large following.įrom 1959 to 1962, Mr. Scott’s Navy service, “The Joy Boys” was broadcast on WRC-AM from 1955 to 1972 and on WWDC-AM in Washington from 1972 to 1974. Scott and a classmate, Ed Walker, took to the Washington airwaves with a comic radio show, “The Joy Boys.” After he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and religion from American University, Mr. He was smitten with broadcasting from the time he was a boy, and at 16 he became a $12-a-week page at WRC-TV. was born on March 7, 1934, in Alexandria, Va. The son of Willard Herman Scott, an insurance salesman, and Thelma (Phillips) Scott, a telephone operator, Willard Herman Scott Jr. Scott’s days at WRC: “He was pushing a shopping cart in a Virginia supermarket recently when a little old lady charged by and smacked him with her umbrella. Then again, as The Boston Globe reported in 1975, there was this incident, from Mr. But as he readily acknowledged, the weatherman’s job as reconstructed for the postmodern age did not require any. Scott, who began his career in radio before becoming a weatherman at WRC-TV, an NBC affiliate in Washington, had no background in meteorology or any allied science. The pig did not take kindly to being kissed and squealed mightily. There was the time, reporting from an outdoor event, that he kissed a pig on camera. There was the time he did so dressed as Carmen Miranda, the “Brazilian bombshell” of an earlier era, dancing before the weather map in high heels, ruffled pink gown, copious jewelry and vast fruited hat. There was the time, for instance, that he delivered the forecast dressed as Boy George.
He seemed simultaneously to embody the jovial, backslapping Rotarian of the mid-20th century, the midway barker of the 19th and, in the opinion of at least some critics, the court jester of the Middle Ages. Scott brought to the job a brand of shtick that harked back to earlier times.
Though he was meant to represent the new, late-model television weatherman, Mr.
Scott went on to sport a string of outré outfits, spout a cornucopia of cornpone humor and wish happy birthday to a spate of American centenarians, all while talking about the forecast every so often, until his retirement in 2015.
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