RAIN oR SHINE Even as a kid, Yvonne Schalle wanted to get into television. The Global TV meteorologist just wasn’t sure how. So, after completing a Bachelor in Communication at Simon Fraser University, she did what anyone in her shoes would have done — she went backpacking in Europe with a friend for two months. Returning to Canada, she stopped in Toronto to visit her brother, and started applying for jobs. She lucked out with an intern position at a local station. “I was on-air by the second day,” Schalle recalls. Interviewed at Global headquarters in an industrial part of her hometown of Burnaby, Schalle is as friendly and outgoing as her onair personality suggests. It’s easy to see why her bosses were so eager to get her in front of the cameras. Her exotic look is the result of mixed parentage — a Swiss-German father and a Cantonese mother. Her maternal grandparents were originally from Canton, and immigrated to Malaysia at young ages. Her paternal grandparents, now deceased, lived in St. Gallen, in Switzerland. “Both sets of my grandparents never spoke English,” she said. “And both my parents spoke their mother tongues to me.” As a result, Schalle grew up speaking Cantonese and Swiss-German, and didn’t start learning English until she went to school — although her older (by two years) brother would come home speaking a few words. She still speaks Cantonese to her grandmother everyday, and with her mom “if we don’t want someone else to understand.” She took Communications at SFU because she
thought it might lead to the career she wanted, but also because, as a first-generation offspring of an immigrant family, she knew a university degree would be important to her family. Following her first broadcast job in Toronto, Schalle moved to Calgary, where she did mostly entertainment and lifestyle segments. “I always was interested in weather reporting, but I just never came across the right job. All the ones I had applied for needed years of experience, so I never had the opportunity to get my foot in the door until someone was away.” While in Calgary, she occasionally filled in for the regular weather person, and then returned to Toronto to work at The Weather Network and CityNews. At the same time, she enrolled a three-year correspondence broadcast meteorology program through Mississippi State University. She completed the program two years ago, one year after she’d moved back to Vancouver for the job at Global. Now she delivers weather reports for the station, regularly on the weekend and sometimes filling in during the week. Even though most would perceive the weather in Vancouver to be, in a word, consistent (in two words: consistently wet), Schalle never finds the job boring. “The draw is, every day is different,” she
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