WCCO meteorologist Paul Douglas retired Friday, bringing to an end a broadcast career spanning five decades. But he'll continue to run his Eden Prairie-based weather prediction company and produce his regular weather columns for the Star Tribune. "I'm retiring from radio, so I'm turning down the dial a notch," Douglas said Friday, adding that he plans to spend more time traveling and with family and friends.
Douglas grew up in Pennsylvania's Lancaster County, in the heart of Amish country. He earned a meteorology degree at Penn State and began his broadcast career in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area, where he worked for the local news station. He soon moved to Satellite News Channel, which went live in 1982 and was purchased a year later by media mogul Ted Turner and was promptly replaced with CNN programming.
Douglas was hired in 1983 by WTCN-TV, the Twin Cities' NBC affiliate, which later became KARE 11. It was at KARE that Douglas covered what he calls the most memorable story of his career: the live broadcast in 1986 of a Fridley tornado, captured at close range by a KARE photographer from the station's helicopter. Douglas presided over parts of the broadcast as the twister unfolded in real-time.
"That continues to blow me away," he said. "There was nothing like it and there continues to be nothing like it. We were fortunate to be in the right place at the right time with the right team.
" A close second, Douglas said, was the 1991 Halloween blizzard that ended up blanketing.