Nash

WWL-TV meteorologist Nash Roberts dead at 92

For more than 50 years, Gulf Coast weather-watchers relied on Mr. Roberts to tell them where tropical storms would come ashore.

From before Hurricane Betsy in 1965 to beyond Hurricane Georges in 1998, Mr. Roberts was widely considered the region's most authoritative source for hurricane news.

And in the age of Super Doppler and satellite imagery, there remained for hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians a great sense of relief in seeing Mr. Roberts on screen with his throwback bulletin-board-style weather map and felt-tip pens.

What can I say? I'm (just barely) old enough to remember Nash Roberts and his old dry-erase board as a necessary component of hurricane preparedness. When Channel 4 pulled Nash out of mothballs and put him on TV we knew something serious was happening.

But it wasn't just that. Watching Nash draw picture pages as the storm bore down on New Orleans wasn't just something we did for informational purposes. There was ritual in it. You could compare it to a voodoo practice but I would prefer to do without the occult connotation. Maybe some people thought that watching the Nash Roberts forecast would actually affect the physical universe in some way, but most of us just did it for the same reason we eat black eyed peas on New Year's Day or decorate for holidays. It was just what you do in the situation.

Not sure what we'll do next time.