Percy Saltzman Web Log

Percy's Messages

Below are blog entries that Percy made during his later years when he sponsored this site and started blogging. You may use the Previous or Next links to move through the messages. Alternatively you can pick one from the pulldown list based on date and topic.

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Date Posted: November 19, 2006
Topic: Memories of a Mediocre Meteorologist
Message Body:

In days of yore, erroneous weathermen were jailed, pilloried, executed (even!) for the errors of their ways.

Thank god I never lived in those horrid times.

But in my own time I too have suffered the slings and arrows. I have been pitched out of a window, bodily, for my errant ways.

It happened during my first wartime posting as a MetMan at Centralia SFTS, one of the many airbases Canada built especially for the BCATP, that marvelous engine for the destruction of Herr Hitler.

As a Metman on base, I was a civilian, but with officer privileges, one of which was messing with the officers, and not the other ranks. Not that I wanted to mess with the men anyway. I am bent the other way.

One boozy evening in the officer’s mess, a bunch of the boys were hooping it up, when, for reasons incomprehensible to me, they suddenly rushed me, picked me up and flung me through the nearest window.

Luckily the window was wide open, and we were on the ground floor, so that as I hit the deck, I crumpled softly and fracture free. Apart from the shame of it, and the honor of it, I came through unscarred, body whole but my mind a mess, my pride in shreds – and the malady lingers on.

Now as a prelude to all the above, when I first met Met, as the rawest of recruits, I read a witty book on the weather by a British meteorologist. The book’s title: “Drinking Deep at the Isobar”.

In it, he told the tale of an ordinary Brit, a weather nut, the proud possessor of a venerable Weather Glass, that clocklike, brass-bound, glass-faced barometer that allegedly foretells the weather by pointing its needle at one or more of the words, “Fair”, “Stormy”, “Rainy”, “Changeable” or even “Dire”. You tap the glass to free-up its creaky needle, and lo! You have your forecast right on the face of it.

On this particular occasion, as the Brit rapped the glass, it pointed to “Fair”, when in fact it was pouring cats and dogs outside at that very moment.

The Brit, in a snit, seized the offending glass, tore it bodily from the wall, hurled it smack through the nearest closed window, exclaiming, “Here, see for yourself, you damn fool!”.

That’s how I felt when I was pitched through that window in the officers Mess at Centralia SFTS, one moonlit nicht the nicht, in the glorious year of our Lord, 1943.

I was then 28, green at the gills, but I learned the first rule of the weatherman: “Zip the lip!” Keep the forecast to yourself! And don’t mess with the Mess!