Forecast calls for golf, walking the dog

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/12/2023 (845 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A fluffy grey and white dog barks from behind the bay window, breaking the silence of an otherwise quiet part of Silver Heights.

Andy wags his tail as owner Robert Cooke opens the door into the living room as a digital thermometer hangs beside the TV.

Cooke, 84, made monthly weather charts for the Free Press for 30 years. He’s calling it quits as his January birthday approaches.

“I figured it’s time to pull the pin,” Cooke said. “I can still do it but it’s just getting more difficult (as I age). I just figured I’d take it easy.”

Cooke’s weather charts appeared in the Free Press on the last Saturday of each month; his final report was published Nov. 25.

Cooke moved to Winnipeg from the West Coast as a 21-year-old to train with the Royal Canadian Air Force. He met his wife, Carol, during a dance at the mess hall a few months before he was discharged from his courses.

At that time, he didn’t track the weather — and wasn’t used to the chilly winter temperatures after being born and raised in Vancouver.

“It was in January when I met her and being from Vancouver, I wasn’t climate-oriented and so I walked from Whytewold (Road) down to Marjorie Street,” Cooke said, laughing at the memory. “My ears got kind of frozen because I didn’t have proper clothing, but I smartened up pretty soon.”

Cooke took a position as a meteorological technician with the federal transportation department.

His job involved recording weather and atmospheric conditions and patterns, and transmitting the data to government departments such as transportation, agriculture and natural resources. In addition, the information was reported to the public.

Cooke and a few of his friends also started their own company, Weather Tech Services Inc., in the late 1980s.

The business provided local weekly newspapers with weather charts until it closed in 2006.

“In those days, we had to go out every hour and read the thermometers and make the reports and send them down to the main office, all across Canada and in part of the States, too,” Cooke said. “Eventually, things progressed, newspapers got more sophisticated and started to get their own (reports) somewhere else, so our business went down.”

Cooke’s work took him throughout Canada; he lived in Dauphin, Regina, Churchill, Saskatoon and then back to Winnipeg around 1975.

He said after retiring in 1994, creating weather charts for the Free Press was a way to keep busy even though each one took only an hour to make.

While meteorologists look at short-range weather data, climatologists review weather patterns over a longer period of time to find trends and changes in climate.

Without the daily data from meteorologists, climatologists wouldn’t have anything to study, said Gerald Chang, an Environment Canada meteorologist in Toronto.

“It’s interesting to compare, for example, this Christmas to last Christmas,” said Chang. “I find it interesting how the data tells a different story. When you’re studying long-term… it takes out the day-to-day information.”

Canada officially started recording weather observations and tracking data such as precipitation, wind speed and direction, humidity and temperature in 1840.

For Cooke, no longer tracking the weather won’t have much of an impact on his life, which he describes as quiet.

In his spare time during the warmer months, Cooke golfs multiple times per week. He likes to spend time with his three children and three grandchildren who live in Winnipeg, and take Andy out for walks.

He picked up the pooch from Thompson about a decade ago.

“He was walking around town and nobody wanted him, so I adopted him… and I’ve had him ever since,” Cooke said. “He’s a good companion.”

Cooke says he’s used to Winnipeg winters now but still remembers days spent at English Bay in Vancouver when he was a child. He added that he’s only visited his birthplace once since settling in Winnipeg.

“I enjoyed Vancouver and swimming in the ocean all the time in the summertime,” Cooke recalled. “It’s all built up and all changed (now).”

Historical weather and climate data can be accessed online via the historical climate data web page on the Government of Canada website.

jura.mcilraith@freepress.mb.ca