He has received bow ties made of mink and bow ties carved out of wood. Schwartz, according to NBC, gets a lot of fan mail. And if anyone would ever look at the tape, what I said was I compared it to the blizzard of ’78, which … ” “I still don’t take full blame for what happened that day. “People use me to vent their frustrations,” he says, on the phone from his current job at CBS in New York. One night at a bar, a man urinated on his leg, snarling, “It doesn’t look like snow.” His only recourse was to flee the city. The tokens of appreciation he’d grown accustomed to receiving from fans - the lacy underwear, exotic pictures, poems - were supplanted by trinkets of discontent: pages torn from the Bible, anonymous death threats, a beer bottle stuffed with dead crabs. Of course, those emotions can change in the time it takes a rainstorm to roll across a summer sky, which is what Philadelphia’s original weatherman-as-celebrity, Schwartz’s predecessor John Bolaris, found out in the winter of 2001 after he spent a week hyping the Storm of the Century - and it failed to appear. It’s not surprising, then, that viewers might find themselves with an emotional connection to the weather people. All over the city, weather personalities join the comforting rhythm of everyday rituals: They’re in the room while a family eats breakfast, reflected in the eyes of a man as he dresses for work, the last faces a lonely woman sees before she goes to bed. And why not? They’re the number one reason people tune in to local news, since the information provided is most relevant to one’s daily life. ![]() Of these, it is weather people who seem to hold the populace in particular thrall. ![]() The stars from channels 10, 3, 6, 29 are like our Brat Pack: They’re beamed into our homes their hobbies and love lives and catfights are dished about in the newspapers and magazines press releases trumpet them as “celebrity guests” at events they’re honored with awards grand and obscure. While Schwartz was clearly the most popular personality at the NBC 10 booth that day, he isn’t by any means the only local TV personality who gets this kind of treatment. Philadelphia has a fascination with its television personalities, perhaps more so than the citizens of most other cities.
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