The First Ronald

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a calliope, a balloon squeak, applause from nowhere)
Nineteen sixty-three. Washington, D.C.
The very first one was the weatherman.

[Verse 1]
Before he was the fellow who told America the forecast,
before the Today show and the birthdays and the smile,
Willard Scott was a local radio man in Washington
who put on a red wig and a nose and did the local ads.
He invented half the business. He made the whole thing up —
the walk, the voice, the laugh. That was him. That was his.

[Chorus]
The first Ronald! The first one was the weatherman!
And they let him go, and the reason that they let him go
was that he was, in the corporate view, too large —
they wanted somebody slimmer to sell hamburgers to kids.
The first Ronald. Fired for his size.
By a hamburger company. Sit with that a while.

[Verse 2]
And Willard, to his credit, told this story for years,
without much bitterness, with the timing of a pro,
'cause he'd got the better deal in the end and he knew it:
he got to be himself on television for forty years,
his own face, his own name, his own actual laugh,
while the character he built got handed on to somebody else.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
There have been hundreds since. Maybe thousands. Nobody knows.
There was a training school. An actual school, with a curriculum.
They were taught to move the same, to laugh in the same key,
so that no child anywhere would ever meet two different ones.
A person made into a uniform that other people wear.
That's not a job. That's a haunting with a paycheck.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(calliope winding down)
The first one was the weatherman.
And they thought he was too big.