Nash Roberts sits in the house he has lived in for over 50 years, saying a medical mystery causes his legs to fail him unpredictably.  But his mind has not changed one bit from his days with a felt-tip marker in hand, telling us the weather.

For a half century, he told us of hurricanes, tornados, rain storms and heat waves, but left it all behind in 2001 to take care of his wife Lydia, when a malformation in her brain changed her life.

“She just gradually got to the point where her brain didn’t do what it was supposed to do,” he said.

For the next six years, he never left her side.  That is, until one morning about a year ago.

“I took some time out from the bedroom, came in here and was reading the paper and my son Ken was in with her,” Nash recalls.

“He came in and said, ‘Dad, Mom just passed.’  Oh, my world just crumbled then.  I've never really recovered.  I don’t know if I ever will recover.”

Nash met Lydia through his girlfriend at the time, a woman who was more friend than date.  They often took walks through their Broadmoor neighborhood, but one day his girlfriend took him a different route.

“She said she wanted a change and we accidentally bumped into a girl standing in front of her house.  It was Lydia, and they put on this little show, like ‘Oh, what are you doing here?’  It was a setup!”

In fact, it was a setup that lasted 66 years. “The finest moment of my whole life,” is how Nash remembers it.

Together, the Roberts raised two sons who gave them four grandchildren, who in turn gave them six great-grandchildren.

It was because of Lydia's frail condition when Hurricane Katrina was building in the Gulf of Mexico that Nash did something he had never done.

“For the first time in history, I evacuated,” he says.

They lived in an Episcopal retirement home in Baton Rouge for two months, watching the devastation unfold as so many did.

“I was trying to analyze what was happening to different neighborhoods.”

As a scientist, Nash looks at weather disasters, from Katrina to the  more recent cyclone in Myanmar and earthquake in China, and sees these events not caused by years of man disrespecting the Earth, but more as a natural process.

“I think it’s like what happened to me,” he jokes.

“Normal aging, when things begin to fall apart.  The older your planet, the more changes you are going to run into.”

These are the thoughts of a man who has lived in what he calls the most productive century in history.  He was here for the beginning of aviation, the space age, the computer age and of course the birth of television, something he never dreamed he'd be a part of.

“I told them I wasn’t cut out to do that sort of thing, no dramatic training and no this and no that.”

It didn’t matter.  For more than 50 years, he did it his way, as the scientist he was, with his markers and map.  He felt very strongly about keeping his professional independence, choosing to never be an employee of the television station, but rather a private contractor whose weather decisions would be his own.

“It cost me a lot of money,” he says.  “I was never in a profit-sharing program and never in a retirement plan.”

“But I don’t regret it.  A lot of times, the things I said weren’t popular with other meteorologists.  I always wanted to be happy and liked by everybody, but you can’t do that when you deal with people's lives.”

It is perhaps his integrity and believability that came through the screen those 50 years.  Nash Roberts was a child of the Depression.  He saw his father lose his good-paying job, to work any job to feed his five sons.  It was a defining time in a young boy’s life.

“It made me take care of myself financially.  The family always laughed at me,” he said.  “When I was a little boy, I always had something going to earn a few nickels.”

He grew into a man who had many things going.  He became a pilot, a meteorologist, a businessman, an investor, a teacher, a farmer, a beekeeper and a Christmas tree grower.

Nash says he lived by a phrase he heard as a child: “Always have an anchor to the wind."

“So that if the wind blows, it won’t blow you into the rocks.  I always remembered that, I always had a little anchor somewhere.”

It has been a life of hard work and interesting experiences, but when asked about some of the highlights of his life, Nash Roberts has just one answer.

“The best thing that happened in my life was a no-brainer.  It was the night that girl introduced me to Lydia.  That’s the most pleasing and momentous thing that happened to me.”