| Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette - Columnist Ruth Ann Dailey
Change
of outlook in Kansas blew weatherman back to Pittsburgh
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
Is everybody here?" asks the man on the stage. "Raise
your hand if you're not here."
Giggles erupt as scores of little hands shoot up.
The man takes out a big coloring book he says he bought that
very morning. As he rifles through it -- showing the children
but not looking at it himself -- the giggling resumes.
He looks. Does a double-take. All the pages are blank.
He asks the kids to take a piece of color from their shirts
and throw it at his now-closed book. They do. And presto-chango,
the pictures are there -- in crayon brights.
"He's magic!" whispers a first-grader to her friend.
But Dennis Bowman's best magic trick may be reinventing himself.
It's something that suddenly unemployed people often have
to do. Some face the challenge in public -- where, for instance,
will Jerome Bettis go when the inevitable happens? Most do
it anonymously.
Bowman, WPXI's meteorologist for 16 years, left Pittsburgh
in 2000 when his contract expired. The station's management
told him "they needed someone to take them to a new level,"
he says. He landed gracefully enough in Topeka, Kan., a smaller
media market near his native Kansas City.
After three years there, though, Bowman decided he was done
with television. He and his wife, Debbie, returned to Pittsburgh
in September, and he launched a new business, doing exclusively
what he'd done for years on the side -- live weather education,
one community group at a time.
"The weather keeps changing," he tells hundreds
of kids in the "cafetorium" of Cranberry's Rowan
Elementary School. "You wake up and it's sunny. Then
the clouds roll in, and soon it's raining."
Yup, that's a Pittsburgh forecast.
Suddenly there's a muted yelling. Bowman moves toward a suitcase
marked "Chester Drawers." As he opens it, the cries
become clear.
"Let me out! Let me out!" He lifts up a red-haired
dummy named Chester, and we're off and running with rapid
patter full of puns. Bowman whips through the ABC song, getting
Chester to repeat each line after him -- until Bowman sings,
"Tell me what you think of me," and Chester says,
"Okay, your nose is too big."
The kids laugh in delight, fully engaged. When Bowman speaks
to senior citizens groups, he uses a dummy named Dennis McGinnis.
Charles Mack, creator of the dummy that Edgar Bergen named
"Charlie McCarthy" in his honor, also handcrafted
McGinnis. As only the fifth owner of the century-old doll,
Bowman takes McGinnis out for crowds who grew up listening
to Bergen and McCarthy on the radio.
He gets gigs through his Web site, www.dennisbowman.net,
and through extensive contacts in the region. The kids don't
remember him-- they were toddlers when he left -- but their
parents and teachers do.
Bowman thought about re-establishing himself in Kansas City,
"but the 'who's he?' factor would have been a lot to
overcome." With his 16 years on air here -- and his grown
daughters here, too --Pittsburgh was the logical choice for
this "Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs" come to
life.
The kids clap along so enthusiastically during a Dennis/Chester
duet that the teachers have to shush them. They quiet down
in time to hear Bowman pause and call out, in a Steve Martin-esque
moment, "In German now!"
The mix of serious, silly and downright absurd seems to carry
information straight to the kids' brains. If their teachers
asked them two weeks after the assembly to explain the difference
between "high" and "low" weather systems,
I bet most could.
These children know firsthand why accurate weather forecasts
are important. Bowman mentions the "microburst"
that swept Cranberry in mid-October. "Some of your houses
were destroyed or badly damaged, weren't they?"
Then he unveils "The Mean, Mean Tornado Simulator Machine."
Imagine a contraption shaped like a large box kite, with a
burner and pan of boiling water on the bottom level and a
small fan sitting on top. Between the two levels are four
support columns -- tubes with rows of punctures pointed in
toward the boiling pot. A blow-dryer is attached on one side
of the bottom level, and when Bowman turns it on, air flows
up the punctured tubes and out into the steam rising from
the pot. The fan sucks the air upward.
"Oohs" and "ahhs" start right then, as
the children see the steam beginning to swirl clockwise. Then
Bowman, wearing goggles and gloves, plucks dry ice from a
cooler and throws it into the pan. In the burst of white air,
the mini tornado is perfectly visible.
Those high and low systems the kids just learned about? This
is what can happen when those systems collide. This is what
destroys houses. The lesson is clear -- and memorable.
"What's your job?" one child asks, his voice still
awed by the tornado.
"I was on television for 31 years," Bowman responds,
"but I finished that two months ago. This is what I really
like to do."
You see the show, and you know it's true.
Ruth Ann Dailey is a Post-Gazette staff writer and can
be reached at rdailey@post-gazette.com
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