“One of the great things about this job has been giving back and being involved in our community,” she says, as she plans to devote more time to her faith community.
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Not that is necessarily her favourite colour, but Lori Graham is looking forward to reacquainting herself with some green garb.
The longtime CTV Montreal weather specialist has spent much of her professional life in front of a giant green screen. Viewers don’t see it because weather-map graphics are superimposed on their TV screens instead. But if she were to sport green, only her head and hands would appear. Funny but freaky.
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After a little more than 25 years of analyzing often madcap weather patterns over the skies of Montreal, Graham, at the top of her game, has opted to bid adieu to that green screen to give back on a volunteer basis, focusing particularly on her church community.
“Yeah, I’ll get to wear green again and I won’t have to talk about Groundhog Day anymore,” cracks an upbeat Graham, clad in an eye-popping coral pantsuit, in front of said green screen at CTV’s studios on René-Lévesque Blvd. E.
Graham, in announcing that she’s leaving May 30, has taken viewers by surprise. It’s more than seasonal highs and lows the native Montrealer delivers. She has become totally ingrained in the fabric of the city, be it her involvement in countless charitable fundraising activities or pulling off wild stunts like rappelling down a highrise office building all the while doing a live weather report.
“Lori has been a beacon of light in the gloomiest of times — her smile lights up the city, no matter the weather,” one saddened viewer commented.
No question, Graham exudes warmth, on or off TV.
Graham followed in the tradition of another icon on the local broadcast scene, the late Don McGowan, for whom the weather was only part of his story.
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“There have been so many mixed emotions for me about leaving. I’ve always loved working here. For 25 years, I have been wearing this weather hat, so when people see me now, it will be weird to take that hat off. But if they ask, I’ll still give them a report.”
Of course she will.
“I guess I’ll always be obsessed by weather.”
Graham has seen it all over the years: worsening climate change, El Niño and La Niña winters, summer heat waves, wildfires, floods, eclipses, aurora borealis, even hurricanes, earthquakes and tornadoes, and, lest we forget, dreaded ice storms. Mercifully, she has been spared amphibians falling from the skies.
It’s worth noting that CTV first hired her to do weather during the 1998 ice storm. “It was baptism by ice,” Graham muses, in spite of the fact many Montrealers were blacked out from catching her on the tube.
Graham is quick to point out she’s not a meteorologist “but I have weather training.” She studied science before undertaking a broadcast journalism degree at Concordia.
Her plan was to do news. She won a journalism award in her second year at Concordia, which led to an internship at CJAD. Not long after starting there as a reporter, she covered a rather titanic moment: the 1995 referendum.
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“I remember going into the news booth while the results were coming in,” she recalls. “I was still in my second year of university and a much more senior reporter asked if I wanted him to go in instead. I don’t know where the guts came from, but I said I’d do it. It was quite the moment.”
Not long after, Global TV asked her to come in for a weather-reporting audition. She got the gig and was on the air there for one night, when then-CTV news director Barry Wilson reached out to her.
“Next thing I knew I auditioned for the CTV weather job, received weather training and was blessed to have great meteorologists from Environment Canada helping me and to have that science background coming in handy – and the rest is history. I never dreamed I would work at the station I grew up with.
“I loved it from the start. Weather is something everybody talks about. It unites us. We have crazy weather here. We have all kinds of crazy weather here even in just one day. So there’s always something to talk about. It became a passion.”
In the initial stages of weather reporting on CTV, she was also doing traffic and news on CJAD.
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“I would wake up at 4 a.m. and was on the air at 6 until noon. Then I’d take the headset off and head up to CTV studios and do weather: I’d put together the graphics, then head out with a cameraman to do something live between 6 to 7 before coming back to the station. On weekends, I would be doing weather at 6 and 11:30 at night. I would finish at midnight on Sunday night, then get up at 4:30 for the radio. I did that for almost a year, until I was full-time at CTV.”
It’s called dues paying. Nor did it take long for other stations around the continent to take note of Graham’s acumen on air. She was to be offered weather jobs everywhere from Toronto to Los Angeles.
“But my family is here. My parents had been my biggest fans. That’s what has kept me here,” says Graham, who is married to entrepreneur Frederic Mimeault and stepmom to his four daughters.
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At a time when a career in the media is not the most secure of vocations, Graham is leaving on her own volition. Question most asked is why?
“This is something I’ve thought about for a long time: what would my life look like after CTV? My faith has always been really important to me. One of the great things about this job has been giving back and being involved in our community.
“I just really felt the time had come, that I was being called to use the gifts that had been given to me to serve my community in a more tangible way. I really felt this was the time.”
We work in a very cynical business in an increasingly more secular society here. But Graham is undaunted about holding her beliefs in these times.
“When I first met my husband at our church, I really felt we were put together for a purpose,” she says. “During the pandemic, we could see just how much people were suffering, because people need community and there’s so much isolation and loneliness in our society. We had a food pantry going, but it’s more than just physical and tangible needs. I feel people’s souls so need to be fed.”
Graham’s voice takes on a sombre tone and she begins to tear up a tad.
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“There was a period in my life where I was so broken too — where I was feeling lonely and isolated. It was such a great time career-wise, but personally it was such a dark time for me.” Pause. “Most people never saw that. It was part of my personality to be bubbly and smiling all the time. But something was missing.”
That turned out to be faith.
“That’s what has transformed my life. I have been blessed tremendously, but to be a blessing for other people is what I want to do now,” she says. “I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do. I don’t have a job that I’m going to. We just started a new church on the South Shore. People are searching for something to satisfy their souls. There is so much talk about religion, but this is not about a religion — it’s about a relationship. That’s the difference.”
bbrownstein@postmedia.com
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