I guess there are people who always knew what they wanted to be when they grew up and then they became whatever it was. I never thought I'd end up doing what I ended up doing.
When I was about three I wanted to become a pin boy in a bowling alley, which I thought was a way cool thing to be. By the time I might have been old enough to be considered for such a position, however, they had invented the automatic pin spotter which made pin boys obsolete.
Other ambitions I recall were to become a fireman, a teacher, a soldier, a scientist, or a concert pianist. But I was really inspired by the ten o'clock news on WBBM-TV (channel 2) in Chicago. When it first started in the mid-1950's it was fifteen minutes, but they later expanded it to half an hour. It featured Fahey Flynn reading the news and P. J. Hoff with the weather.
This guy was not a weatherman. This was way before it occurred to television stations how authoritative it would make them look if they had a trained meteorologist do the weather. Some stations had a weather girl (isn't that how Oprah got her start?) and WBBM had P. J. Hoff, who was a cartoonist. He drew happy suns and angry clouds and giant raindrops on a big paper weather map with what looked like a Magic Marker with a one-inch tip.
When it was time to report the current conditions, they would show a drawing of a man in an office sitting behind a big desk looking out the window. He was leaning back in his chair with his feet up on the desk and his hands behind his head. Hoff called this dude the "Vice President in Charge of Looking Out the Window."
If ever there was a job I aspired to, it was that.
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