Buck Matthews in 2019

Buck Matthews, who for years was a household name in West Michigan as a WOOD TV (Grand Rapids) weatherman and show host passed away this past Monday (3/30).  He was 97.

Matthews joined WOOD-TV in 1961 and remained on air for more than two decades. He was known for his charm, wit and humility. He was not a trained meteorologist and instead presented National Weather Service forecasts.

According to an article on the station's website, Matthews died peacefully early Monday, according to a post on his Facebook page. He had entered hospice care over the weekend. “We want to thank you all for your thoughts, prayers and caring. Your friendship meant so very much to him. He so enjoyed sharing thoughts with you,” his loved ones posted on Facebook.

“I drew on a map with a black marker where the lows and the highs were — and the worst of it was … that I didn’t know what I was talking about it. For 21 years, they paid me to do something I didn’t even know what I was talking about,” Matthews once said. “If it rained, I got wet.”

In April 1967, he was live on the air to cover a tornado that, at the same time, hit his own home in metro Grand Rapids. He recalled being at home and seeing the sky turn black, saying, “I’ve never seen a black sky, even at night, like that.”

“So I got in the car and I drove to the station,” Matthews said. “Went on the air and I’m on the air for maybe 10, 15 minutes and … (a co-worker) came to the studio door and said, ‘You better call your wife.’ And I called my wife the minute I could. And a tornado had come through and hit our place and torn down our garage and squashed my ’31 Chevy and blown our dog away.”

The dog survived and later returned home.

On “The Buck Matthews Show,” which launched in 1971, Matthews met and interviewed many famous guests and said he was sometimes starstruck.

“Conversation was the trick,” he recalled in 2019 as WOOD TV8 marked its 70th anniversary. “If you had one good opening question and one good closing question and let the rest of it go, they would make it go where they wanted it to go. And it became more fun than work.”

According to the biography on his website, Matthews grew up in Washington, D.C. He served in the U.S. Air Force, working as a radio operator in Korea. He worked in civilian radio part-time in metro Detroit while still in the military. After getting out and attending Columbia University, he got his first full-time radio job in New Jersey.

Later, he joined WJR in Detroit. He moved to TV by joining the NBC affiliate in Jackson, Michigan. His next job was in Grand Rapids, where he remained for decades. After leaving WOOD TV8 in the 1980s, he went on to be a program director at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp and general manager of WBLV and WBLU before he retired in 1995. He also wrote three books.