Once-stormy Bolaris shows a sunnier side

Meteorologist John Bolaris was a media lightning rod when he worked at Channel 10: scattered brawls, flurries of name-calling, nights of deep canoodling.

He's also the guy who, in 2001, hyped the big snowstorm that missed Philadelphia.

So why - more than a year after he returned to Philadelphia after five years in New York - has there not been a dusting, or even a dustup?

Friends say that the 51-year-old Bolaris, now chief meteorologist at Fox29, has grown up.

The "new" John, they say, can be attributed to his daughter, Reina Sofia, a long-haired sprite who just turned 5. Bolaris shares custody with his former girlfriend Tiffany McElroy, a morning anchor in New York who briefly was a coworker at Channel 10.

"Having a kid has slowed him down, in a good way," said Matt Cord, the WMMR radio personality and 76ers announcer.

Bolaris, who led a Philadelphia Magazine writer on an all-night bender for a 1996 profile, is largely a homebody these days.

"On a Saturday night, we'll go to a BYOB and come home and watch a movie," said Lauren Nelson, who has been his steady since he joined Fox29 in January 2008.

Nelson, a forensic toxicologist, is 23 years his junior - a fact that makes both wince when it's brought up, even though Bolaris has always had a thing for much younger women. "I guess the age difference should be a big deal, but I don't really see it," said Nelson, who met Bolaris in December 2007.

"I appreciate people who love what they do, and I love it that he loves his daughter," Nelson said.

Bolaris said that fatherhood made taking the job at Fox29 "the toughest decision I have ever made in my life."

McElroy, who agreed to speak only about her daughter and not her own relationship with Bolaris, said: "Obviously, for Reina it would be beneficial to have both her parents in one city, but we do the best we can. She loves her daddy. . . . She teases him about being a weather guy. She imitates him, 'I'm John Bolaris, weather guy.' She has a great sense of humor. Which comes from me."

Bolaris, who sees Reina every other weekend, said he felt he had no choice but to take the job in Philadelphia. The summer before, contract negotiations at New York's WCBS had grown testy. The job market was, and is, tight. He looked to Philadelphia - an hour by Acela - where he worked from 1990 to 2002.

Philadelphia, he said, would be "an exciting new challenge." When he had joined Channel 10 nearly two decades ago, he was painted as the young buck usurping legends Gene Crane and Herb Clarke. At Fox29, Bolaris was cast as the guy who bumped Rob Guarino.

Given Philadelphians' obsession with the personalities who appear on their television sets each night, it was no wonder that Bolaris would become a boldface name in the 1990s. Consider: his liaisons with coworkers, including Jane Robelot; a long relationship with singer/songwriter Lauren Hart; the time a crowd of drunks decided to toss him in the air; a supposed feud with talk-radio host Howard Eskin; and a well-publicized quarrel with management about his use of hair mousse.

"I was always amazed at how they always portrayed him like he was some Hollywood womanizer," said Terry Coyle, a retired New York firefighter who has known Bolaris, the son of a truck driver and a housewife, since they were in seventh grade, on Long Island. "I see articles and I don't understand it. I guess it's a smaller city. When he lived in New York, nobody wrote about him."

Gossip may have annoyed Bolaris, but nothing stung as badly as the fallout from what's known as either the "storm of the decade" or the "storm of the century," depending on who's telling it.

While preparing Channel 10's forecast the night of Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2001, Bolaris and producer Harry Holmes noticed a "major storm" in the Gulf of Mexico that could arrive the following Monday.

It was past 9 on the last night of the February sweeps. Steve Schwaid, the news director at the time, was working late.

Schwaid, now news director of the CBS station in Atlanta, said Bolaris suggested running a "crawl" across the screen to alert the masses. With Bolaris looking over his shoulder, Schwaid said he tapped into his keyboard: "The NBC-10 Earthwatch team is now tracking the possibility of one of the biggest East Coast storms in the past decade. NBC-10 will have the very latest following Law and Order."

Bolaris and Holmes said it was Schwaid who ordered the crawl.

What followed was a storm, all right.

The 11 o'clock news did not even lead with the forecast. Viewers learned in the weather segment that the potential storm was four days in the future. And by the slimmest of margins, NBC10 won the 11 p.m. ratings for the first time in 30 years.

Though other newscasts and the National Weather Service later also called for a storm for the latter part of the weekend, Bolaris took the brunt of criticism Monday when a total of one inch was measured.

The Philadelphia Daily News crowned him the Hype King. Howard Stern put him on the radio.

"Everyone had it wrong," said Holmes, the producer. "It was the lead story on the national news Friday. How did John start it?"

The story had legs. At WCBS, Bolaris flew on a storm-chasing plane into Hurricane Isabel in 2003. When Bolaris told the crew that he used to work in Philadelphia, "the captain goes, 'There was a weatherman there who called for 40 inches of snow and he . . . ' " Bolaris said he stopped him. "Number one, I did not call for 40 inches of snow."

Bolaris said he realized that meteorologists "live and die over forecasts. I understand during the storm of the century why people were highly agitated. When you get it right, it's expected."

Even after moving to New York, Bolaris couldn't escape publicity here. He said he always afforded the public "easy access. . . . I was never one to put a wall around myself."

On his way out of a Center City nightspot in 2003 with McElroy, Bolaris got into a fight and was sent flying over a table. He said he was attacked and was defending himself. The incident made the papers, and he said his news director ordered him to sign a declaration that he would never again set foot in Philadelphia. She pinned it up in the office, Bolaris said. He is still not sure if she was serious.

Alycia Lane, a close friend of Bolaris' and someone familiar with the concept of news-person-as-celebrity, said she had heard those stories about Bolaris and "they're not even close to who he is. . . . He's one of the kindest and sweetest guys in the industry."

One morning shortly after police officer John Pawlowski was killed last month, Bolaris told Nelson: "I need to do something."

Bolaris phoned a colleague and asked him about doing a benefit for the survivors' funds for police officers and firefighters. The colleague suggested a beef-and-beer night. Bolaris wanted something with more heft. Through Fox29, he is organizing a 5K run from City Hall to the South Philadelphia sports complex on June 6 in hope of raising $50,000.

"That's the side about him you don't hear about," Coyle said.