JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The ever-popular and longtime local meteorologist George Winterling released a memoir. Chasing The Wind, Memories of a Pioneer TV Meteorologist is sweetly dedicated to Winterling’s wife, Virginia. The book details George’s childhood, his five decades as a pioneer meteorologist at WJXT -- including predicting Hurricane Dora to the active 2004 hurricane season. All royalties from the sale of the book will be donated to Wolfson Children’s Hospital.
News4JAX Anchor Tom Wills shares his conversation with Winterling about his book’s debut, “As many of our viewers know, George and I worked together for over 40 years, we had such a joyful conversation about how our business has changed.”
Chief Meteorologist at WJXT John Gaughan says, “If you ever watched George through his 50+ years of being Jacksonville’s Chief Meteorologist and wondered what made him tick, this is a wonderful look at the man and the legend, of George Winterling.”
One of the most asked questions to employees of News4JAX is, “How is George doing?” The viewers that spent decades tuning in to see George’s forecast miss him and wonder what he is up to in his retirement. Now, George has completed a book recalling the highs, low, challenges and ground-breaking moments, he explains in his own words in the book’s forward why he penned the memoir, “In our early years we read about history. In our later years, we become history... ...and know, that as I enter the twilight of my life, I have been thinking about you. I have tried to recall my adventures from childhood and family life to manhood and career. This memoir is an attempt to record for you some of the steps I took while walking this long journey in life before the passage of time caused those memories to fade.”
The book is available on Amazon, you can click here to order a copy.
George also details a moment that many News4JAX viewers will never forget, the day his daughter, Wendy Gale, was born, "It was a blustery March day when I took Virginia to Baptist Hospital for her delivery. We left the hospital five days later. It was a pleasant Spring day when the high temperature was 77° and Wendy weighed 7 lbs, 7 ounces. She was like a doll when we brought her into our home, very calm and seldom crying."
The book is a collection of memories from all eras of George’s life, and just as life is, the memories range from sweet moments we remember fondly, to bittersweet sacrifices his family made for his incredible career.
The book's middle section revisits George's imaginative innovations that changed the face of weather forecasting like how he created and copyrighted space-view maps to portray weather systems across the country, how he created the practice of predicting rainfall chances, and created the heat index, or humiture as he coined it.
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WJXT’s General Manager Bob Ellis describes some of George’s impact and accomplishments, “George Winterling is as famous as it gets. He pioneered the way we do weather, he helped us understand how we can make it relevant to viewers. He was the first to invent satellite maps. He painted clouds on them. He was the first in television to predict rainfall. He created the humidity/temperature thing we call the humiture or how hot the humidity combined with the temperature makes the air feel. The National Weather Service today calls it the heat index.”