Longtime Quad-Cities area weatherman stops in Muscatine on new book tour

MUSCATINE, Iowa – One topic dominates the conversation when Terry Swails comes to visit.

“I don’t think any year was worse than 1936 for cold and hot,” Swails, a meteorologist at WQAD-TV in Moline, Ill., said Saturday in Muscatine.

The weather in 1936, why temperatures vary so much from one town to the next, the width of the destruction when a tornado hit Fruitland in 2007 —all are topics that his fans wanted to discuss and which Swails can talk about in detail.

He met with some of those fans for two hours at River’s Edge Gallery and signed copies of “Un-natural Disasters: Iowa’s EF5 Tornado and the Historic Floods of 2008.” He wrote the book with his wife, Carolyn Wettstone, a former TV reporter, after leaving his job as chief meteorologist at KWQC-TV in Davenport in January 2008. He had worked for more than two decades at the station.

Saturday’s stop was part of the Terry Swails Live Tour he is making across eastern Iowa and western Illinois with Wettstone and Eden Swails, their 5-year-old daughter.

Muscatine-area fans stood in line — usually five or six at a time — to meet Swails, get his autographed picture or pick up a free rain gauge. While some bought “Un-natural Disasters,” others bought “Superstorms (Extreme Weather in the Heart of the Heartland),” another book written by Swails.

Everyone wanted to talk about the weather. Many shared their stories with Swails about the tornado that hit Muscatine in 2007. Some talked about the 2008 flood. Others asked about Eden Swails and shared stories about their children and grandchildren.

“This is it. Just the one,” Wettstone said of their daughter. “We’re really happy to have her.”

His fans — mostly a mix of retirees — patiently waited in line to meet Swails. One man, a farmer in Dickies overalls, asked about becoming a weather spotter for Swails, telling the meteorologist his work is important to farmers.

Others in line agreed. “He’s the best weatherman around,” Marge Pape said of Swails. Her husband, Gordon Pape, farms near Illinois City, Ill.

“We farm,” she said. “So we watch him.”