Kevin Mannix is retiring from WCSH after 25 years at the Portland, Maine NBC affiliate.
“Predicting the weather still energizes me,” Mannix told the Portland Press Herald. “It is going to be tough to walk away from this. I’m going to miss it a lot, but I feel equally as passionate about my book.”
Mannix and his wife are writing a book about his struggles being raised by an alcoholic father and how his wife dealt with her mother’s suicide.
Mannix will sign off Friday at Noon. He started at the station in 1989.
The Press Herald says he wrote on his facebook page, ““Being your weatherman the last 25 years has been an honor and one heck of a lot of fun. Weather has been my passion, but the time has come to devote more time to a new passion. I will be filling in a bit from time to time so you won’t be rid of me totally.”
Mannix’s departure comes just four months after he was moved from WCSH’s top-rated morning news program to the weekday noon weather report. He was moved Oct. 20 to make way for meteorologist Todd Gutner, who started at the station in October after working for seven years at WBZ in Boston.
WCSH News Director Mike Redding said Mannix has achieved a high profile among Mainers. The morning news and weather broadcast, which Mannix did for years, reached a statewide audience stretching from the Maine and New Hampshire border to northern Maine and Canada.
“The entire state knows and loves Kevin,” Redding said. “People grew up with him. It’s a generational thing.”
Forecasting the weather in Maine is a difficult job, Redding said. If you are wrong, there can be a backlash, especially from people whose occupations depend on snowfall forecasts.
“He has endured for 25 years. You have to be a pretty unique person to pull that off,” Redding said.