One of Minnesota’s best known and best loved television personalities, weatherman Bud Kraehling began his career as a favor for a friend. When WCAZ (Carthage, IL) was short of staff, a high school friend working as an announcer there asked Bud to stop in and help out, getting records ready to play and reading the market reports on the air. After serving in the US Army during World War II, he came to the Twin Cities as an announcer at WTCN radio. In 1949, he began his television career at what is now WCCO TV. By 1950, Bud was doing a five minute 10pm television weather report for Taystee Bread. Over the next decades, he saw many changes in television weather coverage. Bud wrote forecasts on the “Weather Window” for crowds gathered outside the studio, and later worked from the “Shell Weather Tower”:, an elaborate set with weather maps, dials and gauges. He, with anchor Dave Moore, was a fixture on Twin Cities television, for years. “We started what we called the happy talk, the bridge between news and weather,” he says of his years with Dave Moore. “He [Moore] said later we set a curse on the entire industry for doing so.” Through it all, he has been a reassuring presence viewers loved and trusted. He retired in 1996.