Media

Watch meteorologist Barry Burbank’s first appearance on air at WBZ 40 years ago

The television station is celebrating the forecaster’s milestone on Boston’s airwaves.

By Dialynn Dwyer

1 minute to read

This week meteorologist Barry Burbank is celebrating 40 years of forecasting the weather in Boston for WBZ. To mark the occasion the television station has released a handful of clips looking back on the weatherman’s time in the city, including his first appearance on the channel.

“A lot of people have asked me if this is my real name, if I changed it or not,” Burbank said during his first week at WBZ, before joking “It’s my real name. I never did change it — I’ve had it since 1925, as a matter of fact.”

Clips through the years show Burbank biking and running in Boston, chatting with former WBZ anchors Jack Williams and Liz Walker, and giving his forecast in front of an ever-evolving series of weather maps.

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Burbank reflected on his years at WBZ in a conversation with fellow station meteorologist Eric Fisher. He told his colleague he traces his love and fear of the weather to experiencing Hurricane Carol in 1954, recalling how he covered his ears during the storm and his mother brought him down to the basement for shelter.

“It was just so loud,” Burbank said. “The rain hitting the windows, the howling wind, the trees that were coming down.”

The meteorologist also remembered his “idol” and mentor Don Kent, the man known as “Boston’s first TV weatherman.”

“I watched him every morning,” he said.

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Burbank said when he was a teen he got to visit Kent at WBZ and he loved seeing the studio so much that he built a scale model of it in his bedroom at home.

“Threw everything out, left the bed in the middle of the room and just did weather reports,” he said.

Watch the full interview below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT6AMI7FpKo