“It’s a Cinderella story,” says Ted Buehner. One he considers a life home run of sorts. One that even led to a major Major League Baseball event taking place in Seattle this week.
Buehner tells the story in—what else?—a coffee shop, over a cup of the caffeinated stuff; “water” to the locals. He was in grade school, growing up in the Portland suburb of West Hills, when the squall started, when it grew in size and elevated in intensity. It would later be known as The Columbus Day Storm, or The Big Blow. It’s the strongest non-tropical windstorm to ever hit one of the lower 48 states. And oh, boy, did it .
In 1962, it wiped out power from the San Francisco Bay to Vancouver, Canada; winds whipped into the Washington and Oregon coasts in excess of 150 mph, as fierce as a Category 3 hurricane. This storm ripped homes from their foundations, destroyed property up and down the west coast, wrecked thousands of commercial buildings, toppled every tower in sight, blew more than 11 board feet of timber all the way to western Montana, injured hundreds and killed at least 46. But where most young children fell somewhere between blissful oblivion and abject terror, Buehner considered something else. A career path.
“As a 6-year-old, that’s what sparked my interest [in the atmospheric sciences],” he says. “I wanted to know why.”
He would soon dabble in weather forecasting, because of what that storm had sparked inside him. In high school, he the weather portion of earth science class. He enrolled in college at Oregon State, graduated with a degree in atmospheric science, started a job at the National Weather Service in 1977 and then worked there for 40-plus years.
Over those decades, Buehner came to agree with the popular view regarding the moment extreme weather pointed him in the direction he has followed ever since. That storm was the storm.
His life is pretty much that, too. And, as it happens, Buehner’s perfect storm even ties to Monday, when MLB’s Home Run Derby will unfold a short drive south from his suburban home. The derby, of course, is a seasonal highlight for sports fans, a night when baseball’s best and beefiest long-ball launchers do nothing but crush high-arcing shots skyward. T-Mobile Park, of course, is also a stadium where, conventional wisdom suggests (along with some historical data), home runs are swallowed and spit back onto the field. Which leads to perhaps the most odd juxtaposition in derby history.
Will Monday night mark the most boring iteration of a competition built with excitement at the forefront? Or will it deconstruct some myths about offensive baseball in Seattle?
That’s why we went to Buehner, who’s now known across the region by the nickname his college buddies bestowed upon him for their long-running fantasy football league. Who better to explain all this than … .