How does a simple felt tip marker write an important chapter of New Orleans history? Easy - when it's in the hands of Nash Roberts, in front of a map, calmly explaining the weather, often when it mattered most, during a hurricane.
Friday marks the 100th anniversary of Roberts' birth.
During more than six decades on local television, the man everyone called by just one name, “Nash,” became an institution. So much so that when Mother Nature threatened, viewers would ask "What does Nash say?" to gauge the impact of a hurricane.
That’s because he had been on local TV sets almost from the beginning, as the city's first on-air meteorologist. But even he would admit that it was the science, and not style, which he valued most.
A New Orleans native, Roberts served in the Navy during World War II, where he was the first meteorologist to fly into the eye of a typhoon to plot the storm. When he returned home from the war in 1946, he opened a weather consulting office to serve oil companies and the maritime industry.
In 1948, he was hired by WDSU-TV to help track the path of a hurricane. Three years later, he became a full-time TV meteorologist, the first in the south.
His career would include work at three of the city’s stations, including here at Channel 4 beginning 30 years ago, in 1978.
Although he retired from nightly weather forecasting on Channel 4 in 1984, he was on call for hurricanes until 2001 and when he died in 2010, The Times-Picayune called him perhaps the most trusted man in New Orleans history.