MILWAUKEE’S FORMER METEOROLOGIST VINCE CONDELLA

MANY WISCONSIN RESIDENTS are familiar with multi-talented, now-retired meteorologist Vince Condella, a former weather reporter for television’s Channel 6 news. His friendly demeanor and clear, upbeat reporting style brought energy and momentum to the daily weather reports throughout his career.

Condella began his meteorology career in Madison, working at WMTV Channel 15 in 1980 and WKOW Channel 27 in 1981. He then moved to Milwaukee, and on February 22, 1982, he began working at Channel 6. He retired 34 years and 3 months later, on May 25, 2016.

Condella’s interest in weather began at an early age, during his childhood in Lombard, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. He was fortunate to have the support of his parents, who worked to encourage his budding passion. “By five or six years old, I was interested in all things weather, and my parents fostered that interest by buying me books about the weather and going with me to the library to check out weather books,” Condella explained.

Condella still owns two of his childhood meteorology books, Weathercasting, by Charles and Ruth Laird, and Your Guide to the

Weather: An Introduction to Meteorology, by George L. Cantzlaar. The first was a gift from his parents in June 1966, two months before his eleventh birthday. The second book, also a gift from his parents, was received in October 1966.

Condella’s parents supported his weather interest with other special, memorable gifts. When he was ten years old, his parents gave him an anemometer to measure wind speed. “We hooked it up on the roof of our house (well…my dad did!)—and I would spend hours in my bedroom during storms and watch the winds gust on the analog dial hanging on the wall,” Condella recalled.

During his formative childhood years, Condella recalls being impressed by several weather events. Though he remembers experiencing “our share of winter storms and spring/summer severe weather,” Condella cites two weather events as having a particular impact in his youth. “The Palm Sunday tornadoes of 1965 (I was nine years old at the time) were huge,” Condella explained. “And the Chicago blizzard of January 26-27, 1967 brought two feet of snow to northeast Illinois and shut down everything for days.”