After 20 years on the job, South Surrey resident Wayne Cox is saying goodbye to the role of weather forecaster on Global TV's top-rated News Hour.
Photograph by: gord goble , Surrey NOW
By now, Wayne Cox has collected so many Hawaiian shirts, they fill a separate closet in his South Surrey home.
"It's gotten to the point where I have enough of the shirts to not repeat wearing the same one from the 24th of May to Labour Day," said Cox, the cool weather forecaster for Global TV's top-rated News Hour.
Later this month, Cox is leaving the television weather gig for other broadcasting opportunities - more commercial work, perhaps another game show or TV series.
"I'm not retiring, I'm just ready to do something else," he underlined.
"Twenty years of saying 'cloudy with a chance of showers' is enough for me."
Cox, 63, has been in the broadcasting business for 44 years, in both TV and radio.
In the 1990s he inherited the News Hour weather job from Norm Grohmann and quickly put his own spin on it.
Wearing Hawaiian shirts - many of which are given to him as gifts - during the warmer months is a shtick that evolved from a day at the beach for Cox.
"I was asked to go to Kits Beach to do the weather and I really didn't want to wear a jacket and long-sleeved shirt, so I looked in my closet for something else," Cox said. "I threw on this hideous Hawaiian shirt and went on the air like that - and Tony (Parsons, former anchor) just hated it. So I played it up, pretending it was one of my favourite shirts."
Another Cox trademark is the "coveted" ballpoint pens he gives to on-air guests.
"I originally wanted to give out T-shirts or hats or something, but all the promotions department guy had were these cheap pens with the old BCTV dogwood logo on them," Cox recalled. "So I started giving them out, telling people that they were the most valuable things in the world.. People bought into it over the years, it's just amazing."
For Cox, doing the weather gig at Global has been two decades of good times.
"When you go to work and you're on a team that wins the World Series every year for 20 years, that's fun," he said.
Looking ahead, Cox, a South Surrey/White Rock resident for close to 35 years, is keen to play more golf and spend more time with his six grandchildren. "I'm liking the idea of that kind of freedom," he said with a smile.
Twitter @tomzillich
