A lifelong fascination with the weather

Russell Hobby has been keeping the statistics for more than five decades

By ROGER AMSDEN, LACONIA DAILY SUN

LACONIA — Russell Hobby says that he has had a lifelong fascination with the weather, going back to the days when he was a young boy growing up in Eliot, Maine, in the 1950s.

Now 75, Hobby says “I remember my mother taking me down the coast to Portsmouth in 1952. Don Kent, the WBZ weatherman, was setting up a weather station at the Portsmouth Herald newspaper and I got to see it. That was quite a day and it really inspired me. It all blossomed from there.”

Hobby later studied meteorology under another legendary New England weatherman, Bill Hovey, and spent a couple of years working at the weather observatory atop Mount Washington, where he would on occasion be seen on television giving the weather forecast.

After graduating from Oyster River High School in Durham in 1960, Hobby wound up at Belknap College in Center Harbor, where he studied meteorology under the tutelage of Hovey, who would later become well known as the weatherman on Boston's Channel 5.

“He was good. He would give the forecast on a local radio station and we students always used to joke with him about a forecast he got wrong by saying that “the ground is covered with six inches of high, thin overcast.”

Hobby said that after he got his degree he started working at the Mount Washington Observatory. “We worked at least 21 days a month and it was very difficult to get on top of the mountain during the winter. We used to ride up in a big Thiokol Snowcat and it was always cold and very windy. It was really hair raising getting to the top and then coming back down.”

He worked with fellow meteorologists Marty Engstrom and Willy Harris, both of whom became well-known to television audiences all over New England, especially Engstrom whose dry wit and Yankee accent made him immediately identifiable and who was famous for colorful sayings like “It's raining pitchforks, tines down.”

“The wind would sometimes hit 125 miles an hour and it was always something like 20 below zero. We used to have to up into the parapet and get the ice which formed off of the instruments. It was a real challenge. But Engstrom liked it and he became a real celebrity, He had a grand old time up there, and so did I. That was fun, but it was awfully cold,” Hobby says.

Hobby has lived for over 45 years in Laconia, where served 38 years from 1971 to 2009 as a volunteer with Laconia Fire Department and worked at RH Smith and Head's Electric. His son J.P. Hobby is a lieutenant with the Laconia Fire Department and is also a blacksmith and talented welder. Both do a lot of work in the blacksmith shop and welding workshop at Hobby's home.

He still maintains two weather stations, one manual and one automatic at his Summer Street home and is a member of the New England Weather Network of ham radio operators.

Just about every day he's busy answering questions about the weather from people, as well as filing his twice daily reports with the National Weather Service. He also has a medium size garden in his backyard which his wife, Anne Marie, and his son take care of.

Hobby is a consulting meteorologist to the city of Laconia, the New Hampshire Department of Transportation and the National Weather Service in Gray, Maine. For more than 50 years he had the privilege of providing a summary of weather data from where he has lived to Kent. Hobby was one of the many local observers who fed Kent information that was included in a regular roundup of conditions across New England.

“It's been a good life. I've been all over the place and back around again,” says Hobby.

Russ Hobby at his backyard weather station at his Summer Street home. He's been involved in meteorology for over 50 years and spent several years as a weather observer atop Mount Washington. (Roger Amsden/Laconia Daily Sun)

The interior of the automatic weather station at Russ Hobby's Summer Street home. (Roger Amsden/Laconia Daily Sun)

Russ Hobby stands next to a precipitation collection device at his Summer Street home. The ice bar at the right collects moisture during freezing rains. (Roger Amsden/Laconia Daily Sun)