Howard DeMere, the second TV weatherman in St. Louis, died Wednesday after a heart attack.
DeMere started at KSDK when it was the only station in town. He succeeded Jack Garrison who briefly forecast the weather before leaving for a sales job.
For 32 years, DeMere’s worked in St. Louis as a weathermen and then a reporter for KSDK and KSD radio (now KTRS).
In a 2010 feature, KSDK said DeMere “put television weather here on the map.” DeMere told the station, “The weather and the weather set. It started as a simple frame…wooden and covered with a piece of Plexiglass. Write on it with a china marking pencil then you went back over it with a pen and talked about it as you did so…”
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch said DeMere worked hard to overcome the “soft” image being a weatherman had given him.
“He did so successfully,” Post-Dispatch columnist Eric Mink wrote in 1981, “and, in time, became respected as an able, experienced local reporter.”
He was inducted into the St. Louis Media Hall of Fame in 2011.
DeMere was 89.