England, Gary
Born: 1940s, Seiling, Oklahoma
Interviewed: March 28, 2003
Interviewer: Michelle Barnett
Topic: Gary England’s Life and Interests in Meteorology and Oklahoma
Q: When and where were you born?
A: I was born in Seiling, Oklahoma. I don’t give my age. Born in an old yellow house in Seiling in Dewey County. My daddy paid for me with chickens because he didn’t have any money to give the doctor.
Q: And who were your parents and did you have any siblings?
A: My dad, Les, and Hazel England, and I have an older brother, Richard. Richard lives in Denver. And I have an older sister that lives in Canton, and I have a brother that lives in Seiling.
Q: When did you know that you wanted to be a meteorologist and how did you make that decision?
A: Well, it was in 7th grade. There was this guy on television by the name of Harry Volkman who did the weather, and the way he did it made me fall in love with weather.
Q: Where did you go to school at? Which high school?
A: Seiling High School. Then I went to University of Oklahoma, graduated 1965 with a degree in math with a meteorology option.
Q: How long have you been a meteorologist and how much of that time has been here in Oklahoma?
A: I have been a meteorologist all my life. I joined the Navy when I was 17 years old and went to the Navy weather school at 18. So since I was 18 years old, I have been in weather – a long time!
Q: How much of that time has been here?
A: Three of it was in the Navy – let’s think here – four of it was in New Orleans, that’s seven years. So I’ve been in it about 37 years.
Q: How much time in Oklahoma?
A: Thirty.
Q: Do you enjoy being here at News 9?
A: Oh, yea. It’s great. Beats having a real job! It really does!
Q: Being a meteorologist requires knowing advancing technology. How much involvement have you had in helping to advance the field?
A: Some. Back in 1978, when you guys weren’t even a whisper in anybody’s imagination, I think, I was following the research at the severe storm center in Norman – they were working on Doppler radar. There used to be big large radars all up near the Arctic Circle and they would intercept any attack from Russia coming across the North Pole. So they took one of those huge radars – huge antennae – took it down to Norman and started to experiment with it. It was the first Doppler radar. So I following research and then when they did their test, it was obvious that it was going to be much better than the conditional radar. So in ’78 I found a company called Enterprise Electronics and asked them if they could build us a Doppler radar, and the reaction, as I recall, was that they had never thought about that. So, to make a long story short, I got with the people who owned the station, the Griffins, and talked them into – this was a long time ago – $250,000 was a huge amount of money – into developing the world’s first commercial Doppler radar. We got it in ’81 and in ’82, after I learned to use it, we issued the first public Doppler warning in history on television. That was March 1982. A tornado hit Ada and killed one person. So we didn’t invent Doppler. Doppler’s been around a long time, but we moved ahead with the private end of the business, the commercial end of the business, television. So after we did it, then it spread across the country. And in ’90 or ’91 we developed the little map you see in the corner of your screen called First Warning. But what we used to do, we had a red piece of paper and had an Oklahoma map, and if there was tornado warning for Oklahoma County, you took an Exacto Knife and you cut out Oklahoma County and put it on there and put a camera on it. And that popped up on your screen. So when computers became a little more popular, ’90 or ’91, we created a program called First Warning, and a little map pops up on the screen and runs a crawl. That was the first one of those that ever existed and we sold those around the country and the station made a lot of money on it. About the same time or shortly thereafter – I don’t know which one came first – we did the storm projection. The way we had done it forever, it seemed like, it this were a pencil, that’s 30 miles on the radar, and you’d figure it would be there in three hours. We were pretty good at guessing. Until we created the program that takes in where the storm is, what speed it’s moving, what direction its going, it projects out, and then you see the towns and the time of arrival will come up on the side of your screen or on the bottom of the screen.
Q: How did you come up with the idea for the Terrible Twister, then to take that around to the schools?
A: When I went to work here in ’72, I didn’t know anything about television, but one thing I knew is that kids grow up, get married, have kids and have television sets. So I started going to schools. For a while I just went to classrooms, and I’d go to a classroom in the morning and I’d go to a business club at noon. I’d go to another school in the afternoon. I would go to a PTA at night. I was just talking to individual groups. And as the years went along I started talking to entire schools. And then one time I went to Woodward – I don’t remember exactly when it was, probably ’79 or ’80 – they invited me to speak. And I got out there and there were three or four hundred people crammed into this building. I said “This is weird, man, really strange that people would come out to do this.” Then we had a guy who worked here by the name of Jerry Dalrymple, who was pretty creative. He was pretty much in show business and had a feel for this kind of thing. You’d never guess it because he was a big 6 foot Cajun, mean-looking rascal. But he was very good at marketing and promoting. Someone invited me up to speak in Stillwater. It held about, I guess, 1000 people or 750 people. When I learned the number of people it would hold, I said, “No, I’m coming up there.” So Jerry said something along the line, “Why don’t we go up there and we’ll take the helicopter, and we’ll take Patty (Patty Suarez) and we’ll take Roger Cooper, our anchors, and so that’s kind of how it started. We went up there, and I guess it held 750, but like 1000 people showed up. Holy Cow! This really weird! We have something here. We didn’t really recognize it until we did another one. I don’t remember where we went. I guess we did one that year, and we went back to Stillwater the next year and it was even larger. And our general manager went with us, and he was a guy that was really sharp and he just said “Hey, there’s something going on here. This is great.” So he gave us money to buy a screen that’s 20’ x 20’ and the projection systems and sound systems. We were just taped up – you know, cable was taped to the floor, things broke in the show. But that’s how it started, and then became very, very successful.
Q: What was going through your mind when the May 3rd tornado came through?
A: Initially, it was like 100 other days. I’ve dealt with more tornados and severe thunderstorms than anyone else in the world, because I’ve been doing it for 30 years. Normally, people do it for 20 years and they quit. I’ve been doing it for 30 years. And it was like a normal day. Severe thunderstorm here, tornado there. When I realized that it was really, really significant was when the tornado came down near Chickasha and had the big stovepipe with the satellite on it, and by that time several other super cells had gone up, and it was pretty obvious something unusual was going on. When you go back and look at it – and everybody is this way – the weather service was going “typical day.” But it went south in a hurry.
As soon as it got there it really bothered me. You know I have looked at tapes so many times, and when that picture came up I remember saying “Oh, no!” That was the point I recognized it. At 5:57, when it was southwest of Bridge Creek, I guess, was when it – because it cycled several times – it would increase and decrease and dissipate and come back and it just kept coming back. And when it came back it was about a mile wide, and that’s when I made that first-ever statement, “you need to be below ground level to survive.” At that point I recognized that it was going to be a horrific storm. It probably wasn’t going to stop. Probably a lot of people were going to die. This was what was going through my mind, that a lot of people were going to die no matter what I said, but I knew I had to say something to cause them to action. Because we had been doing “tornado warming, Oklahoma County, all residents take tornado precautions” for 30 years. So what are you going to do to get you do to something? “You better get below ground or you are going to die!” That caused them to move, and hundreds, if not thousands of them got out of the path of the storm.
What was I feeling? Dealing with tornados has always been fun up until about that moment. How many years had it been at that time? Twenty-seven or so – it had been fun. But when I saw the helicopter shot, it was a mile wide – it was gigantic and the power line flashes – it turned into kind of a horrific experience for me. I had been in the business so long dealing with tornados, and never seeing anything like that before, and obviously it was going to be really bad.
Q: What do you think about all the lives that you hope to save?
A: Well, I’m happy I can do it.
Q: Especially any kids that were home by themselves?
A: I’m happy about that. It’s good. All those years of going to the schools, and all those “terrible twisters” – you know I’ve been to thousands of places – and it paid off. We had been in the Moore area, I believe five times with twister shows for the public and also at large schools. And hopefully all that helped because at every show I’d always say, and I’ve been saying this since 1972, “eventually an F5 will come through the Oklahoma City area, so you need to be ready. It may be this year, it may be 20 or 30 years.” Well, it finally came, and people knew what to do. But there’s one thing, too – there’s only one good thing about a big tornado – there’s plenty of warning. If there was a big tornado developed today, I can put you or anyone on the radar and they would know it was a big tornado, and you’d know to get on there and say “get out of Dodge,” because they are very obvious, the big ones, so you have plenty of warning and they’re very obvious to deal with. But it feels good to have done some good. There were some of them that just didn’t get out – didn’t get the message. The one guy that was killed right by West Moore, they found him in his chair or bed – the place landed on him, and he had told the rest of them, “Oh, if it’s my time, it’s my time.” Now is that bright or not? If he had left it wouldn’t have been his time, but he stayed so it was his time.
Q: What do you think about the technology where they are wanting to use the radar to determine if we have a bio-terrorism attack?
A: If it works, I think it’s fantastic. They did a study in Florida last year and they used, I believe, the National Hurricane Center radar, and it did pick it up. They blew flour out of the plane and it picked it up. The concept is that it’s not going to be able to do it at long range, because the earth falls off. If you go out 60 miles, the surface of the earth is down 5,280 feet from where we are right now. So for every 60 miles you go out the earth drops down a mile. So any attack is going to have to be fairly low level. So the radars will be good around metropolitan areas, but once you get that program written to pick that up – right now we have automatic warnings – not only is it accurate, but you have automatic warnings on tornados, TVSs (tornado vortex signatures), and mezzo cyclones, and hail, and all this stuff. So you can do the same thing, once we learn what to look for, how it looks on the radar, it’s just like that (snaps his fingers) to write a program and then you have a national network. We have 160-200 big radars around metropolitan areas. It will be a distinct advantage. I think something has to be done.
Q: What, in your opinion, are the lights that are found with tornados?
A: First of all, I don’t know for sure what they are. The flashes appear to be electrical plasma – I don’t even know how to define that properly. Don’t know for sure. But you pick them up on video and they are just like that (snaps his fingers). They appear to come out of the circulation going the opposite way, so it has something to do with wind and speed and pressure. We have caught them now on digital cameras and they kind of look like ball lightening, but they are moving too fast. It’s some natural phenomenon that we just haven’t identified yet. That’s part of it. Some of the ones that people are saying “these are rods” – I don’t know if you’ve gone to a website and seen it – well, what they are is insects that are close to the lens and depending on the shutter speed, if it’s a slow shutter speed, it takes an insect and stretches it out about that long and makes it looks like it’s got all these wings and so they are insects. The one that came over the shoulder and flew into the storm – I don’t know if you saw that one – that’s the one that’s really strange. I saw the video in ’97, a guy we interviewed. He was weird dude. I would have suspected of him of duping the tape, but another guy right beside him shot the same thing and neither one of them knew it. We got it on two cameras. His was digital and was just video tape of some kind. But he brought it in, and he wouldn’t give it to us then. He’d let us look at it, and you could blow it up frame by frame and it was – looked like a highly polished cylindrical tube of some type. Solid. It had mass. It looked like an arrow without the fins. It was seven miles from the storm to where he was and that thing – less than a second it flew by him. The way it looks, it doesn’t look like a bug. It still might turn out to be a bug real close to the lens, but I don’t think so. Because I saw the actual tape. He has a radio show, so he gave us just enough so we would promote his show, and he gave us an old VHS tape of it so we couldn’t really stop it and look at it. I saw it in ’97 and it made my hair stand up on the back of my neck. Because I concluded then that aliens are little tiny people and they fly around – that’s their vacation – they fly around in these tubes. OK?
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: Stay alive!
Q: How long do you plan on doing this?
A: My plans for the future are to continue to do what I’m doing as long as I have something positive to offer. When that’s gone, you don’t want to hang around. I want to walk out the door; I don’t want to be thrown out the door. I love it – like I said, it beats having a real job! You start finding you have an impact on the kids, and hope you save some people’s lives along the way, but probably one of the strongest things that happened was that I know we’ve given guidance to a lot of kids through the years that have gone on to do some pretty neat things. That’s probably the best feeling that you can have about it. The hours are long. Even this week, it’s like I’m in a wrestling match this week because meteorology is all math and physics, but it’s not a science. It’s not easy to deal with. But it’s fun. I just want to keep doing what I’m doing. I like it and I’ll do it as long as I can offer something positive.
Q: What are your feelings about Oklahoma and its future?
A: Well, I think our future is limited until we get a legislature that open-minded and willing to be progressive. You know, why did so many companies move out of Oklahoma to Texas, because there’s personal income tax in Oklahoma, and we’ve lost thousands of jobs going to Texas because they have no personal income tax for the state. And I think it’s the legislature that’s holding us back because every time something comes along that’s very positive or a great idea, they kill it. So I think our future is limited until you get that group of people willing to do something, and I don’t know you do that. I’m excited about Oklahoma and about our people. The thing is we turn out a lot of great graduates from all of our schools and a lot of them stay, but a lot of them go elsewhere. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an economy that you get our school and you get a job here in Oklahoma and you raise your family and have a great time and you love it? But that just doesn’t happen in most cases because our economy is not going there. We have moved away a lot from oil and cattle to other things, but there needs to be a concentrated effort to develop the technology industry in this state. It’s improving some, but – and I may be wrong about the legislature – but all I know is what I see on television and it’s not too good sometimes.
Q: What do you think has been your greatest contribution the history of Oklahoma?
A: A lot of things I can’t talk about. Everything we’ve done – we’ve arrived there because we tried things and we made mistakes, and if you make mistakes and learn, that’s how you get where you’re going. We’ve never done anything, where we say, “Oh, my gosh, let’s step back and do something great.” It was always, “how can we do this better?” If I’ve made a contribution it’s probably been to tornado safety for the safety of Oklahoma. I think I’ve made them aware of what storms are, what tornados are, the risk there is. So I think I’ve raised that level of awareness, and I think it paid off in that May 3rd event. So, if I’ve done anything, that was probably it.
Q: Do you think we’d ever have another tornado like that?
A: Absolutely. There will be another F5 in here, and I can tell you it may be this spring, it may be 30 years, but there will be another one.
