After 45 years and 31 hurricanes, Margaret Orr is signing off.
WDSU-TV’s chief meteorologist plans to deliver her final forecast during Friday’s 6 p.m. newscast. Her farewell follows a full week of the local NBC affiliate “Celebrating Margaret Orr,” culminating with a special retrospective about her life and career at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, March 28.
As New Orleans’ mistress of meteorology, Orr ranks right up there with the towering figures of local broadcast media. She is certainly one of the most beloved.
That’s not just because her forecasting skills are solid, and not just because she’s outlasted just about all of her peers.
Chef Paul Prudhomme and Margaret Orr ham it up in the TV studio in 1985.
During her four-decade run, she fully invested herself in her hometown. She regularly engaged with viewers on social media. She always strove to keep them safe.
And she was never afraid to be herself.
When it comes to the tricks of the TV trade, she is an autodidact — she is largely self-taught. A while back, she started stashing her earpiece’s battery pack in her boots, then running the wire up inside her dress. Previously, she tied the battery pack to her leg with a tourniquet, which was not conducive to standing up for hours on end as a hurricane approached southeast Louisiana.
“At first I was embarrassed,” she recalled last year, “but it makes life easier.”
Only recently has she deployed a wig, and only on the very rare occasions when her swimming schedule didn’t give her enough time to get to a salon before going on-air.
Whatever it took to get the job done, she did. And she did it with personality to spare.
As news of her retirement broke, tributes poured in from politicians, current and former colleagues and the community at large.
WDSU Chief Meteorologist Margaret Orr smiles at the adoring crowds as she serves as the Honorary Muse for the the Krewe of Muses parade through New Orleans on Thursday, February 8, 2024. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
There is perhaps no greater indication of her relationship with the city than how Carnival has treated her.
In 2020, a float in the Krewe of Muses parade saluted “Margaret Orracle of Da Sky.”
The WeatherGirls, a weather-themed dance troupe that marches in the satirical krewedelusion parade and the Krewe of Barkus dog parade, has a sub-krewe named the Margaret Orrs, which reportedly sprang into existence on the balcony of French Quarter bar Good Friends.
During the 2024 Muses parade, Orr rode aboard the krewe's signature red shoe float as the Honorary Muse.
Her career, just like her reign as Honorary Muse, was quite the ride.
A winding road
As a girl in New Orleans in 1965, Orr ventured outside her home near Audubon Park as the eye of Hurricane Betsy passed overhead, amazed to see stars in the sky. Her fascination with weather never waned.
After graduating from the all-girls Louise S. McGehee School in 1971, she enrolled at LSU. She spent a summer working at TV and radio stations in Waco, Texas, and loved it. An English major, she added classes on broadcast journalism and meteorology to her schedule.
English degree in hand, she followed a boyfriend to Charleston, South Carolina, and became a radio station general manager’s secretary. She took a 9-to-5 job as a receptionist at a Charleston TV station on the condition that she could also be a news intern from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m.
WDSU-TV weather staff Dan Thomas, Dan Milham and Margaret Orr Thursdsay, July 15, 2004. (Photo by Matt Rose/The Times-Picayune archive)
She started filing stories and got her foot in the door of the broadcast news business. After three years in South Carolina, she landed back in Louisiana as a general assignment reporter at WBRZ in Baton Rouge who also filled in on weather.
Eleven months later, in 1979, WDSU hired her for the same role: reporter who could also do the weather. She co-hosted WDSU’s morning show, “The Breakfast Edition,” arriving at an empty station at 3 a.m. and turning on the lights. She co-hosted “The World’s Fair Show,” broadcast daily from the grounds of the World’s Fair.
She did weather for the noon and 5 p.m. newscasts. When WDSU took her off the evening news, she added weekend shifts. Working seven days a week while raising two daughters and a son with her husband, Bill, was rough. But being on-air every day boosted her profile.
Along the way, she took remote classes from Mississippi State University to earn a meteorology certification. In 2008, WDSU promoted her to chief meteorologist following Dan Milham’s retirement.
She’s held the post ever since. The 2023 hurricane season turned out to be her last.
Retiring, but not disappearing
At 70, she is ready to move on. Retiring, she wrote in response to a viewer on Twitter/X recently, was “my choice. It is time. Want to spend time with my grandchildren! Run in the sprinkler. Go to baseball games. Play Tea in the garden.”
And she wants to hang out more with Bleu, her rescue border collie, who often stars in her social media posts.
Her retirement pursuits are not without their own hazards. A couple summers ago, after a hot day of gardening, she ended up in an ambulance bound for the emergency room with heat exhaustion — an especially ironic mishap for a meteorologist.
She was recently “attacked” by one of her rose bushes. The tip of a thorn embedded itself in her arm, which led to an infection and a trip to urgent care (she shared photos on social media).
As she devotes herself to other interests, she’s stepping away from TV, but not from watching the weather. She’ll continue to post daily on social media about storms and such. Old habits, it seems, are hard to break.
“I am retiring,” she clarified on X, “but that does not mean I can flip a switch and stop what I do.”
And so, Margaret Orr fans, take heart. After Friday, she will retire, but not disappear.