Cold Snap Can’t Frost Over Gloat Factor as San Diegans Taunt Still-Colder Cousins

It happens every year around this time. It’s as predictable as the sun gleaming off your windshield, or the watch’em-go-higher rates charged by SDG&E.;

OK, so it has been a bit nippy lately. Still, it isn’t anything like Embarrass, Minn., or the North Pole, of which we do like to remind ourselves because we feel not just warmer but prouder.

You know the refrain: The nightly weather report on the local news opens with shots of several feet of snow in Buffalo, Des Moines or St. Paul, and then the weatherman says, “Wow, they’re really suffering back there. But the weather here--could it be more beautiful?”

Why is it that Russian weather in other parts of the country arouses such regionalistic hubris in San Diego?

‘Do You Live in Paradise?

Are we really that smug? Must we keep telling ourselves that, yes, we do live in paradise?

Television weatherman Larry Mendte, who forecasts for KFMB-TV (Channel 8), calls it “the gloat factor.” He says winter gloating is as much a part of the San Diego experience as Sea World or the zoo.

“We do a thing here called the gloat phone,” he said. “Once a week, we call someone in some other part of the country, such as Utah or Minnesota. We ask them what it’s like there and why they continue to live there. We say, ‘Did you really have a choice in the matter? You mean, you want to live there?’ We ask for people to write in giving us names and phone numbers of relatives who live in such God-forsaken places. We’ve gotten more than 200 responses.”

Mendte, who grew up in Philadelphia, came here seven months ago from New York. He said he left a sprawling house with more than 2,000 square feet and a larger salary to live in a smaller home just because he is enraptured by the weather here--and the life style it breeds.

Winter Gloating

“Winter gloating really is the pastime of San Diego,” he said. “I guess it’s because people who move here really want to feel they did the right thing--and let’s face it, everybody comes from someplace else. ‘Someplace else’ is usually cold.

“When they hear the temperature is below zero in Minnesota, it makes them feel that they didn’t waste their time by moving here--into a house that’s half as big as the one back home and to an area that probably doesn’t have the sense of community they left behind.”

Mendte said San Diegans should continue to brag and be smug, “because when you’ve got it, flaunt it. The one thing we’ve always got going for us is the weather, which is maybe the best in the world. It really is. It’s as if God set the thermostat.”

Clay Haswell is the news editor of the Minneapolis bureau of the Associated Press. He’s a journalist who worked in Alaska and Boston before settling in Minnesota, where winter, in his words, turns people frost-in-the-face angry, especially when they hear from gloaters like Mendte.

“I find hearing about the weather in San Diego really depressing,” Haswell said. “Friends in warm-weather cities keep mailing me copies of the USA Today weather map, circling where they live and then circling Minnesota. We’re always in the deep blue area, and they’re in the (warm-region) white or red. One friend in Florida does this every two weeks or so.

‘Dismal, Depressing’

“Today, it’s dismal, depressing, gray, really awful. I’d love to be in San Diego, although I should tell you we’re in the middle of a heat wave. It’s 11 above now, which is great, because it’s been 20 below ever since I can remember.”

Told that San Diego children can play outside almost any day of the year, Haswell noted that his 12-year-old son, Tapio, went outside one day last week--at 6:50 a.m.--to wait for the school bus. At the time, the mercury hovered near 25 below zero. Tapio waited for about half an hour, but the bus never came. Presumably, it was a victim of the weather--or was on its way to San Diego.

Haswell said a large part of his job is supplying Southern California newspapers with photographs of grisly winter scenes in and around Minneapolis--cars stuck in snowbanks or women who look as though they’re modeling February fashions in Leningrad. Every time he answers such a request, he is reminded of a balmy winter he can only dream about, and, he said, the resentment builds.

He’s heard the theory that Southern Californians are more shallow than the deep thinkers in the cold parts of the country, because they’re not indoors in the winter. For that reason, this causes their brain to atrophy and their reading habits to erode to the level of “Doonesbury.” As the theory goes, cold weather causes people to bond closer--if you can’t go outside to jog (how selfish can you be?), why not stay inside and discuss Sartre with your best friend, over a cup of hot cocoa?

“That’s nonsense,” Haswell said. “People choose to live in Southern California for a reason. People here tend to get depressed in the winter. They tend to stop communicating. Boredom sets in. Everyone feels trapped. They feel sorry for themselves. We’ll go to bizarre lengths to tell ourselves this isn’t the case.

“We’ve adopted a new city slogan in Minneapolis: ‘We like it here.’ Yeah, we like it here. The part I like in the winter is starting up the car, and the steering wheel won’t turn it’s so cold. Your car goes klunk, klunk, klunk down the road. Yeah, we like it here.”

Weather for Fog Lovers

Joel Siegal is a San Francisco attorney and sports agent who moved from San Diego to the city by the bay and in 1982 gave The Times this reason for doing so:

“I’d grown tired of a city where the weather is a more prevalent topic of conversation than, say, El Salvador.”

After several years in San Francisco, Siegal said that Mark Twain’s words are true: The coldest winter he ever spent was that summer in San Francisco. He’s said it’s weather made for fog lovers and Billie Holiday-like “Good Morning, Heartache” blues.

“You might say now,” he said, laughing, “that I’ve grown tired of a city where El Salvador is a more prevalent topic of conversation than, say, the weather. Hey, give me San Diego.

“I really miss the opportunity to go outside at all hours of the day and run. Here, my exercise has grown erratic. I’ve gone from looking like (Olympic diver) Greg Louganis to looking like Ernest Borgnine. The weather’s great here if you have this thing about umbrellas or your rich uncle owns stock in winter jackets. I’ll tell you, though, the bad part of San Diego’s weather is that everyone wants to move there. One day, that will catch up with you. Mark my words.”

Al Reese is vice president of public affairs for the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau. He moved here from Boston in 1969 because he was freezing.

Reese said that, in 1988, the bureau received more than 78,000 phone calls and more than 23,000 letters from chilled outsiders expressing interest in a San Diego escape--temporarily or permanently. Many of those calls and letters came when the weather around the country was at its blue-face fiercest.

Minnesota’s Haswell said a town near Minneapolis is aptly named: Embarrass. He said it may be the coldest spot in the country and not only lives up to the moniker but deserves it.

He also said that San Diegans deserve their smugness:

“Hell, most of those people doing the gloating probably came from Minnesota or Iowa, which is just as cold. Probably the only thing they’ve ever done in their lives is to move to San Diego, which I guess counts for something.

“In that one move, maybe they all showed a stroke of good sense.”