Tedi Thurman – Miss Monitor
It was said that she had the most recognizable female voice in the country. She was the “weather girl” on the long-running NBC radio show “Monitor” in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Tedi Thurman came on and in soft, sexy tones she lured us into rapture with “Cleveland, 34, snow; Boston, 41, cloudy; Phoenix, 62, fair; New York City, 43, sunny; Paris, 38, cloudy.”
She always led her weather report with Atlanta because Georgia was her home state, according to Dennis Hart, author of “Monitor: The Last Great Radio Show” (2002). Monitor was created by Pat Weaver (father of Sigourney Weaver), then president of NBC, in 1955. I remember it well. It filled my weekends from 8 a.m Saturdays until midnight on Sundays.
Ms. Thurman, who died on Monday at 89, made the forecasts “sound like an irresistible invitation to an unforgettable evening,” according to Jack Gould in The New York Times right after the show’s premiere.
Monitor became a hit with hosts like Dave Garroway, Hugh Downs, Frank Blair, Gene Rayburn, Henry Morgan and Bill Cullen, and offeried an array of news, sports, comedy, variety, music and live remote pickups from around the nation and the world. For the first six of the show’s 20 years, Ms. Thurman was featured as the so-called Miss Monitor, updating the weather hour after hour.
Decades after she’d left the show, people at parties and gatherings would still ask her to do the weather in the sexy Miss Monitor voice.
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