A Hot Streak Ends to a Degree : San Juan Man’s Weather News Got Headlines

The weather’s been rough on Jeff Miller, keeper of the mercury in a place that is not accustomed to being the nation’s hot spot.

First there was the notoriety that came with being San Juan Capistrano’s volunteer stringer for the National Weather Service at the tender age of 16.

And now, 10 years later, there’s this business of recording the nation’s highest temperatures for two days running. He almost made it three in a row Friday, but the city’s high of 86 was two degrees off the 88 mark recorded in El Cajon, Monrovia and Gillespie, Calif.

Standing out in a crowd is not something that Miller feels too comfortable with.

Broadcast Weather News

“Being kind of popular and famous was not good for a teen-ager,” Miller said, recalling his days of broadcasting the San Juan Capistrano weather on radio station KSBR in Mission Viejo.

“I finally went to where people didn’t know who I was, in the (San Francisco) Bay Area,” he said. “Although I did run into one girl who did know me.”

So it was with a bit of reluctance that Miller agreed to strike up a conversation about the weather--what he calls his hobby. But he did.

He said his parents “can take all the credit.” Until Miller, who now studies finance at Saddleback College, returned to their home last month, they had been the ones calling the National Weather Service in their son’s absence to report the city’s highs and lows, rain or whatever weather phenomenon happened along.

Of course, as residents of Hibbing, Minn., will tell anyone who cares to listen, Californians have no idea what a real weather phenomenon is. It was Hibbing that recorded the nation’s Friday morning low of 32 degrees below zero.

“How cold is cold?” asked meteorologist Karen Gunderson, who from her post at the Hibbing airport was in a position to know. “It is so cold that it hurts to breath when you walk outside.”

Walking outside is something that Hibbing residents try to avoid.

But once an hour on Friday, Gunderson said, she had to don her snowmobile suit--a waterproof, insulated jump suit--and her felt-lined snow boots and her wool socks and her hat, to do what she called a “weather observation.”

Her biggest observation in recent days has been that it’s very cold.

Friday afternoon, however, with 12 inches of snow on the ground, there was a warming trend. It was above zero.

“It’s an everyday thing for us,” said Frank Chamernick, the watch commander on the job at the Hibbing police station. “Twenty, 30 below is nothing to us. The cold don’t slow us up.”

Not that Friday’s heat, mind you, was enough to slow down San Juan Capistrano residents either. They were out and about, doing what they always do.

Field worker Gilberto Chagolla, 38, was installing little plastic cones over the delicate bell pepper plants at Kinoshita Farms.

“These past three days, it’s been real hot,” he said, wiping his brow. “It can make you feel real tired.”

And at the Capistrano Inn, out-of-towners Lisa and Tom Lebo were dipping their toes into the pool. They had just come from an unexpected overnight stay in St. Louis, where the snow kept their plane grounded, and before that, their home in Shippensburg, Pa.

Snowstorm Back Home

“It’s wonderful out here,” Lisa Lebo said. “Back home, there’s supposed to be a snowstorm, with about 12 inches.”

The Lebos said they would be staying through the weekend in Orange County, where the forecasters predict a sunny sky and temperatures in the 70s.

Don Bowman, a meteorologist with WeatherData, which provides forecasts for The Times, said winds may pick up a bit on Sunday, but overall it should be “pretty pleasant” through the weekend.

Although that may no longer be big news for San Juan Capistrano, it is not likely that Jeff Miller will be slacking off. Record highs or no, he takes his job seriously.

“There was a need for somebody to do this,” Miller said of his idea to become the keeper of the official thermometer in San Juan Capistrano.

Neighbor Helps Out

And Miller’s next-door neighbor, Carl Buchheim, 74, former San Juan Capistrano mayor, also helps out when he can.

“I sort of fill in for him when he’s gone,” Buchheim said. “I sort of pinch-hit for him.”

Buchheim, born in Santa Ana and raised in San Juan Capistrano, has the detached coolness that is ideal for an objective weatherman. He has seen it all; even 92 degrees in February doesn’t faze him.

“I’ve also seen it 16 degrees--not here but in the valley,” Buchheim said. “And I’ve seen snow along that ridge, for 3 1/2 days, all along the top of that ridge,” he said, pointing out the window of Miller’s living room. Buchheim said he thought that was 1946, but it may have been ’47.

But as far as Miller knows--and he would--San Juan Capistrano has never before had the distinction of being the nation’s hot spot two days in a row.

Buchheim, however, cautioned that such records must be kept in perspective.

“I think in a week it’ll be cold, and people will be saying that has never happened before,” he said.