DetNews columnist Neil Rubin's tribute to the late Sonny Eliot

If you lived in SE Michigan for any period of time since , oh, about 1950, you already knew Sonny Eliot.

November 19, 2012 at 1:00 am
Neal Rubin
Weather less on Sonny side
Always-cheery prognosticator was serious about his job and as good-natured on air as off
Neal Rubin
17 Comments


Sonny Eliot, shown behind the WWJ radio mic in 2007, went from Detroit lad to World War II bomber pilot to prisoner of war and, finally, to iconic Detroit television and radio personality. Here's a look back at his career. (Ankur Dholakia /The Detroit News)
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There's something simple to be done today to honor Sonny Eliot, and only weathercasters can properly do it:

Don't say "wind chill." Or worse yet, "wind-chill factor." It's the wind and the chill that are factors in the wind-chill index — which, come to think of it, is another term Sonny could always do without.

The rest of us are welcome to avoid those terms, too, but it won't mean as much as if everyone with access to a microphone banishes them for the day.

Sonny, whose funeral was Sunday, was as good-natured off the air as he seemed when he was giving a weather report. But the one thing you could count on to make his toupee flutter was any mention, in any form, of wind chill. He considered it "a way to dramatize the weather, and the weather doesn't need dramatizing."

-snip-

"I love flying," Sonny would say. "I just don't like getting shot down."

He was piloting a B-24 on a mission over Gotha, Germany, in early 1944 when the pilot of a Focke-Wulf fw 190 took exception and shot his bomber out of the sky. When Stalag Luft 1 was liberated 14 months later, he grabbed some souvenirs from his prison file, including a memo the commandant wrote after he had the phrase translated and learned that "bleeping goon" wasn't an endearment.

There was, clearly, no setting he couldn't improve, and no one's day he couldn't brighten. In a cutthroat business, he was the guy who brought Band-Aids.

-snip-

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From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20121119/OPINION03/211190329#ixzz2CjUqHpoz