Bob Jenkins, one of the most popular weathercasters in Los Angeles local TV news in the 1970s, emerged today after having been missing for 30 years in the Angeles National Forest.
“We sent Bob out to track a big rainstorm in 1979,” KTLA News 9 spokesperson Halle Fredericks told a hastily assembled Hollywood news conference. “I guess we forgot we sent him out there. You know how busy things get in a newsroom.”
Jenkins, now 72, gaunt but in surprisingly good condition, lived on “nuts, berries, and squirrel meat,” Fredericks told reporters. “He would occasionally ransack the sleeping bags of homeless people or people who were out camping in the Forest. But to his credit, he never left his post.”
Fredericks said that Jenkins, now under observation at Thalians Mental Health Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, had a “unique work ethic that caused him to remain in the Angeles Forest for three decades, microphone in hand, earpiece in ear, waiting for the signal for him to come back to the studio.
“Unfortunately,” Fredericks said, “Jenkins never got that signal. It must have been a busy news day—maybe something with the economy or, I don’t know, some other big stories were happening. And we just forgot about Bob.”
As soon as Jenkins is released from Thalians, Fredericks said, he will return to the Angeles National Forest “because another winter storm is coming, and StormWatch 2000 will be tracking it in real time, with Bob Jenkins live from the Angeles National Forest.”
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