“When you hit the big time, big money, big egos, people don’t talk. You have no friends.”
“Thanksgiving just gets me all warm and tingly and all kinds of wonderful inside.”
“When I was just starting out in the business, I used to love to watch Lorne Greene doing the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I said right then, ‘That’s what I want to do someday,’ and it’s been one dream that has come true.”
“Positive feelings come from being honest about yourself and accepting your personality, and physical characteristics, warts and all; and, from belonging to a family that accepts you without question.”
“Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody ever seems to do anything about it.”
“I’m not the dumbest guy that ever lived.”
“Everything I’ve ever done in my life has been a fluke.”
“I get all fired up about aging in America.”
“There are plenty of good-looking women out there. Go get them.”
“People over 100 are the fastest-growing group in America. People soon will be working ’til 100 – some because they have to – and living ’til 125 or even 135. What do I know, I’m just a weatherman, but I’ve made a hobby of studying this, and it’s phenomenal.”
“Having a phobia has changed me.”
“August depresses me a little. I don’t even feel like eating. And when I don’t eat, that’s a sure sign of stagnation.”
“Never slap a man who chews tobacco.”
“The critics – how come you never see any of them on TV?”
“Remember Judy Garland? She retired 40 times.”
“It was a big story and yesterday’s soup. Who cares?”
“I’m Southern Baptist, not a meteorologist.”
“I wore dresses all the time. I like to wear dresses.”
“I think women can cope a lot better than men.”
“You go from Pampers to Depends!”
“Nature’s a tranquilizer as you get older.”
“I got more mail than anybody on the history of The Today Show, but half of it was to get me off the air.”
“I’ve produced more pilots than United Airlines, and they’ve all been disasters. Every audition I ever took in my life I lost.”
“Just do the math. In the next 50 to 75 years, people will be living to be 130 and 140. They’ll be working until they’re 100. It’s incredible.”
“The best cookies of all in the world are the ones my daughter Sally makes. They come out all uniform with nice little air holes.”
“Tom Browkaw said it best. He said NBC could survive without him or the rest of the news division, but not Nancy Fields.”
“The TV weatherman has always been one of the best, most secure jobs. They change anchors, they change the set, producers come and go. But the weather person hangs on forever!”
“Will Rogers was an American hero – someone you could get your teeth into and love.”
“I love commercials.”
“I go to McDonald’s at least once a week. I always get a No. 2.”
“Nobody actually talks to anybody anymore. People in cubicles next to each other, they e-mail each other.”
“There is something endearing about the weatherman.”
“I’ve always had a reputation as a buffoon.”
“Viewers figure, ‘Uncle Willard doesn’t know any more about the weather than I do.’ They’re right.”
“As an only child, I never felt insecure and always had total love.”
“I’d like to do ‘Saturday Night Live.’”
“I have always said that the best training to be a TV newsman or anybody on television is to do a children’s show because you are oblivious to the fact that there is a camera there.”
“I run me like a conglomerate, because that’s what I am.”
“I want to get my own show because ‘Today’ will eventually get tired of me, or the audience will get tired of me.”
“These days, you have to have a gimmick to do the weather. You have to have an act.”
“I do a lot of schmoozing.”
“My grandmother’s house – she ran it just like her grandmother and her great-grandmother. They didn’t have electricity. They had wood stoves that never got cold.”
“I talk too much. I eat too much.”
“Take a microphone out of my hands, and I’m just plain folks.”
“When something’s over with me, it’s over.”
“I have the best job in the entire history of broadcasting.”
“It’s simply a tragedy that anyone today goes blind from glaucoma, when it’s so unnecessary.”
“The only way to predict if there’s a cloud on your horizon due to glaucoma is to get tested. No matter what the diagnosis, the forecast is for clear vision in the years ahead.”
“Why do we love our grandparents so much? Part of the reason I think has to do with the tremendous natural affection and affinity that kids have for older people, whether they are their actual grandparents or not.”
“I had the privilege of having two sets of loving grandparents.”
“My grandmother was a typical farm-family mother. She would regularly prepare dinner for thirty people, and that meant something was always cooking in the kitchen. All of my grandmother’s recipes went back to her grandmother.”
“Now that I’m a grandfather myself, I realize that the best thing about having grandkids is that you get the kid for the best part of the ride – kind of like owning a car for only the first 10,000 miles. You can have your grandchildren for a couple of days and then turn them back over to the parents.”
“In high school, I weighed 175 to 180. I looked like Abraham Lincoln. I was 6-foot-3, biggest thing in the class, but tall, not fat.”
“I’m a country boy.”
“My dad was an agent for Met Life. In the ’50s, I remember the mortality rate was something like – you had – 58 was the average age. Then it was moved up to 62, and then 65, 68.”
“I loved Harry Truman with all my heart and soul.”
“When I can, I do 25 minutes of calisthenics every day.”
“I still start to get panicky each morning before I go on television. I’ll say, ‘I’m in awful shape, something is wrong,’ and if I start to look like I’m going off the deep end, Jimmy Straka, the stage manager, will say, ‘You’re all right. Calm down.’ Then Bryant Gumbel will grab me by the leg or something.”
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