For the first time since Jimmy Carter was president, Ken Cook next week won’t be gracing WAGA-TV with his now gray but still identifiable mustache and his confident, reliable weather forecasts.
Instead, the veteran meteorologist will likely be on his boat near his home on Lake Lanier, literally gone fishin’.
“I don’t fish a lot,” Cook said in an exclusive interview three days before his final time in front of Fox 5 cameras Friday night. “The reason? I usually don’t catch a lot. Now I’ll have time to work on it.”
Cook said he decided two years ago that this would be his final contract with the Fox affiliate, which was a CBS affiliate for the first 15 years of his career at WAGA-TV.
“I’ve actually started to collect Social Security,” Cook said, noting he’s 66 years old. “Why am I still working? And honestly, financially things got a lot better after the downturn in 2008. I considered at the time to take an early retirement, but the downturn happened.”
Before becoming a broadcaster, Cook spent several years at the National Weather Service where he was a weather preparedness spokesman, speaking before business groups and schools. But he said at the time, some of his colleagues were moving to TV, where the pay was significantly better.
So he jumped aboard the TV train in 1979 – and never left.
In the 1970s, many broadcasters doing weather didn’t have a meteorology background. WAGA-TV was trying focus more on professionalism by hiring him, Cook said.
“I was pretty nervous in the early days getting used to being in front of cameras,” Cook said.
His mustache, he said, was already part of his look going back to the mid-1970s when mustaches were in vogue. He said it became such a strong part of his visual persona, he never had the heart to part with it. (His ‘stache even has its own Facebook page.)
One thing that has changed? The technology. At first, he used decidedly analog magnetic maps. WAGA soon spent several hundred thousand dollars on a state-of-the-art radar system and color computer graphics.
Over time, the technology improved even more and so has his ability to fine-tune his forecasting. Even in the early days, he felt he was able to offer pretty accurate forecasts up to two days in advance. That soon edged up to three days. Today, he said forecasts are pretty reliable up to a week ahead.
Cook admits that nobody’s perfect. He didn’t foresee the Atlanta floods of 2009, for instance. “That developed overnight,” he said. “We had never had a system like that. We had never seen that amount of rain in that short a time going back to 1878. Sometimes weather does freaky things.”
Overall, he has never been a man who liked to cry wolf and proclaim every incoming storm as the storm of the century. “I’ve always tried to approach the process with the viewer in mind,” he said.
While most of the thousands of days he has forecast the weather have been normal and quickly forgettable, a few days stick out. The Super Bowl 2000 ice storm debacle. The 2011 super tornado outbreak. This year’s snowpocalypse. And its precursor in 1982, which also paralyzed the city. “My wife Susie worked at Lenox,” he said. “She got stuck on Lenox Road and hiked to the interstate. She found a guy with a four-wheel drive.” She convinced the man to drive her to their home at the time off Clairmont and I-85 by name-dropping Ken’s name..
The weather the rest of this week looks to be very much like Cook himself: pleasant and mild. He isn’t expecting to cover any tornadoes walking out the door.
But expect a classy send-off on Friday by his colleagues.
Cook's retirement plans are modest right now. He plans to buy a second home by the beach at some point. And like retired Channel 2 Action news anchor Monica Pearson, he's open to taking endorsement deals, something he can't do as a working journalist. "I need to get in before she takes them all!" he joked.
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