Page 12 - Discover Winter 2021

Weather Man CONTINUED
of high school, he was getting up at 5 AM each
morning to prepare weather graphics for the Cable
12 morning show. After leaving the show, he’d
ditch his shirt and tie, switch into school garb, and
dash to class. During the school day, he’d post his
weather reports, polish off his column for the school
newspaper, and right after lunch he would don his
shirt and tie once more to give the weather report
for the school’s TV station, Channel 40. During
threatening weather, he often went live on the
school’s announcement system to discuss the forecast.
He was also in charge of updating the Eagle’s Hot-
line, and school administrators had him man a
phone line so folks could get the weather forecast on
demand.
You might say that he was already a fairly
seasoned meteorologist by the time he entered the
University of North Carolina at Asheville to “learn
the science of meteorology.” As you might expect,
Jamey interned each summer throughout his college
years with WSLS, distinguishing himself in his
second year of internship by getting the jump on
a storm that hit late one night. He went into the
station at midnight and tracked the storm for two
hours, answering phone calls from concerned viewers
and giving radar updates. Besides the hours he spent
interning with WSLS, Jamey continued to work at
Cable 12 whenever possible, as well as at his father’s
convenience store.
It was during those college years in 1998
that Jamey began sending weather forecasts to Lake
Radio (call letters today are WSLK – 98.3). He did
this from home, his dorm room and via the Internet.
In that same year, a fill-in spot for a
meteorologist opened up at WSLS, and he was given
first shot at filling it. He was hired, and did his first
show in June of 1998. The next year, however, there
was a change in management at the station, and
Jamie’s freelance position was put on hold. At the
time, he was still in his Junior year of college. Jamey
kept in touch with his friends and contacts at the
station, and eventually got a second chance to work
as a fill-in. By summer break time, management
agreed that he could work five days a week through
the summer months, and weekends during his last
year of college. After graduation, there would be a
10 Discover Smith Mountain Lake WINTER 2020
full time job waiting for him.
In May of 2000, Jamey signed his first TV
contract. The years that followed at WSLS were
some of the best in his life, he says. Within three
years he had worked his way up through the ranks,
from weekends to mornings to evenings. The parent
company, Media General, had even started sending
him to cover hurricanes for their other TV stations
along the gulf and southeastern coasts.
Then in 2006, it all came crashing down.
Jamey hadn’t done anything that plenty of
other people his age had been doing. The difference
is: he was a public figure. To his humiliation, his use
of illegal recreational drugs became front page news.
He immediately stopped all of the partying (“we
were doing a lot of partying”) and checked himself
into rehab. He also ended some relationships that
might tempt him to relapse. As a valued employee,
WSLS management worked with him as he fought
through addiction. He was beginning to settle
into his newly reformed life when the unthinkable
happened. Someone from those past partying days,
whom he thought he could trust, posted a picture of
him on social media. The picture had been snapped
as he exited the shower, which among friends
might have been considered funny stuff at the time.
However, it cost Jamey the job that he loved and had
always dreamed of having, not to mention the public
humiliation.
“I enjoyed the attention I was getting from
girls my age,” he says looking back. “The lack of any
partying while I was in high school and college had
always made me feel like an outcast. I didn’t know it
at the time, but I was using my job and notoriety to
get the attention I missed out on in high school. It
all caught up with me.”
After leaving Channel 10, Jamey returned
to Cable 12 to wait out the non-compete clause
of his contract. Besides saturating the Roanoke
market with tapes and his resume, Jamey re-crafted
a weather report for both TV and the web, and filled
in as needed both on and off the air. He also started
three newspaper columns, did some work for BTW
21 out of Martinsville, and by 2012 was also doing