Meet the 101-year-old weatherman
BRIDGEHAMPTON, N.Y. -- Across the country, 8,500 volunteer observers record the nation's weather every day, but none has been doing it longer than 101-year-old Richard Hendrickson.
"Right now, it is exactly 80," observes Hendrickson.
For 84 years, Hendrickson has been monitoring the highs and lows from the thermometer shelter in his backyard in Bridgehampton, N.Y.
He also checks the rainfall daily. And then glances out his dining room window to check the wind.
"It's clear. There's not a cloud in the sky," says Hendrickson looking out the window.
He then calls it in on his rotary phone to the National Weather Service.
"The sky is clear. The wind is out of the Southwest."
When Hendrickson started recording the weather in 1930, at age 18, Herbert Hoover was president.
His granddaughter shared his journal from the 1930s with us.
"Sure I remember this thing. I'll be damned," he says.
"In 1933. January. Clear and warm."
Weather was important to him because he was a livestock farmer.
This weekend the National Weather Service will honor his eight decades as an observer.
"Am I what? Excited? Oh, yeah, sure. I can hardly talk," he says on the phone.
He does it for his country, Richard Hendrickson says. Collecting the statistics that to this 101-year-old farmer are still just the facts of life.