R.I.P. Former NY State Weather Personality Bob Mills

Bob Mills

Bob Mills, a Rochester, NY radio and television personality who became a local star in the days when weather forecasts could descend into slapstick comedy, died Thursday at his home in Georgia.

Mr. Mills, best remembered as the weatherman on the top-rated evening broadcasts on WROC-TV8 from 1954 to 1974, was 83 years old. He died from complications of a degenerative neurological disorder, according to the Rochester Democrat&Chronicle.

After leaving Rochester television, Mr. Mills was a business owner and an author. He had lived in Marietta, Georgia, for the last 17 years.

Weather broadcasters today tend to be trained meteorologists, anxious to explain El Niños, mesoscale cyclones and lake-effect snow. Mills, though, was of an earlier generation.

"I started out not knowing a thing about the weather," he once said. "I tried to take a dull, uninteresting thing and make it interesting and I succeeded. We weren't trying to make a comedy spectacle out of the weather show, just interesting."

So he laughed along as co-workers sabotaged his live commercial spots. One time they hid a set mousetrap in a loaf of bread he was flogging. Another time he poured a glass of the sponsor's ginger ale only to find it full of cigarette butts.

Viewers ate it up.

Born Arthur Robert Mills in Ohio, Mr. Mills' family moved in 1949 to Rochester, where he became an announcer at WRNY.

Three years later he shifted to WVET, which had television and radio stations, and began filling in on the weather. WVET morphed into WROC in 1959.