The next morning a farmer making his rounds found his prize boar down, testicles frozen to the ground. The farmer, who prefers to remain anonymous, surmised the boar slipped on the ice and was too fat to get up. The boar was never much good for anything after that. But the farmer has a great weather yarn for his grandchildren. In Iowa, virtually everyone has a weather story.
People watch the skies as they have since first plowing the prairies more than a century ago.
Newspaper headlines trumpet snowstorms, windstorms, tornadoes, heat waves, floods, or drought. Almost everyone from farmers to suburbanites watches The Weather Channel, a 24-hour cable channel that claims more than 75 million subscribers nationally. Taylor says everything about the weather is memorable to him. He has a healthy respect for hurricanes, blizzards, and tornadoes. He still remembers a devastating tornado in 1961 in Pecos, Texas, when he was cowering in a bathtub with two other people under a quilt.