My City February 2022

MYDAY

THE WEATHER LADY

Meteorologist Leslie Toldo BY CHERYL DENNISON A familiar face around Greater Flint, Lelsie Toldo has been a meteo- rologist with Mid-Michi- gan NOW since May 2015. “I’ve been reporting the weather in mid-Michi- gan since 2004,” she says. She got her start reporting the weather in Casper, WY and worked in Detroit for seven

years, in Jackson, MS and at another mid-Michigan station for a total of 31 years in the ‹eld of broadcasting. Toldo lives in Linden with her hus- band Rick and their three dogs: Bear, Gus (Labrador Retrievers) and Lucy, a Golden Retriever.Toldo adopted Ellie, a black cat, from the Humane Society of Genesee County in 2020. “She’s our ‹rst cat,” she says. “It was a whole new thing for us but she is the greatest!” Her path to becoming a meteorol- ogist was not a typical one. She studied communications at the University

of Wyoming and ended up with an internship at a radio station.While working as an on-air deejay in Casper, WY a weather job became available and she was asked to apply for it. “I was completely ba™ed! I went to the inter- view and got the job,” she remembers. “Back then, things like that happened.” When she began doing weather in Detroit,Toldo entered a three-year broadcast meteorology correspondence course through Mississippi State Uni- versity. “I ‹gured since I was reporting the weather, I’d better learn about it,”

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