101-Year-Old Weather Observer Still at Work
August 13, 2014 - Richard Hendrickson began recording weather observations for the National Weather Service when he was 18 years old. That was 84 years ago. Honored as the longest-serving weather observer for the United States, Hendrickson says, "It's what I do for my country."
For more about Richard Hendrickson and a
Q&A with him, click here.
Transcript
Richard G. Hendrickson
Can you hear me up there? About how long will I be able to do this? I would like to continue taking the weather and be ahold of my common sense, as long as it is accurate.
Tim Morrin
Richard became a coop observer, at the age of 18, in 1930. Little did he know, 84 years later, he'd be taking observations still. He claims that the station's never missed a day, and it's true.
Richard G. Hendrickson
Clear, partly cloudy, cloudy, when it starts to rain, when it stops, measure how much rain fell, right to within one hundredth of an inch. I take the weather, record it with government weather instruments everyday. It’s what they would like, and I'm here on the farm, so I do it.
Tim Morrin
Today we awarded with the Richard G. Hendrickson Award. He is the first observer to reach 80 years. And, in fact, he is approaching his 84th anniversary. All those 84 years have given us an unbelievable data set of climatology for not only the east end of Long Island, but it threads into the fabric of the climatology of the entire country. To this day, every morning, he calls in his observations. We're very thankful for that, because when he talks to us in the morning, many times he gives us some recollections from the past.
Richard G. Hendrickson
It blew houses away. It blew your fruit orchard away. It blew the corn in the field that you're going to put in the silo flat. The ocean come up over the land and it took a lot of the houses that were built too close to the ocean. The barometer readings, the wind direction, the wind velocity, the amount of rainfall, I kept track of that all through the '38 hurricane.
Tim Morrin
He often says that this is what I do for my country. To get a good handle of whether the climate is changing and how much it is at any one location, you really do need a longer range, more than ten years of data to get any kind of idea of where the climate is going.
Richard G. Hendrickson
It's life with agriculture. You've got to live and work and play with mother nature. She's the boss.
