Grandpa Helped Rao Reach for the Sky
By Dave Mock
Sitting in his Levittown office Monday morning, weatherman Joe Rao talked not about occluded fronts, barometers or radar.
He reminisced about his grandfather, Mario Balzano, who helped him get there in the first place.
"I had just gotten my learner's permit from Columbus High School (in the Bronx)," said Rao. "After I got the permit, my grandfather says, 'How would you like to drive the car?' I thought he was going to go up the side streets or to a parking lot...Instead, my grandfather started directing me toward the service entrance to the Cross Bronx Expressway."
Young Joey, astonished, protested that it wasn't how he was taught to drive in school. "He looked at me with that steely glare and said 'Now, you're going to learn how to drive.'
"And zoom!" Rao laughed, describing his nervous first jaunt on that infamous highway.
Rao's face and voice are well-known for his appearances on News 12 Long Island and on radio stations like WRCN, WBLI, WPAT and WINS. He's currently the nightly weatherman on News 12 Westchester.
But what's less well known is the role his grandfather, an immigrant from Naples, played in molding Joey's character and improving his discipline as a student. In the current Reader's Digest , the astronomer/forecaster describes how Grandpa became his guiding star after his parents separated in 1965.
"It's really a piece about family values more than anything else," Rao said. "Now, being a father, my kids will drive me up a wall. Whenever that scenario happens, I think back and say, 'How would my grandfather have handled this.' I rarely remember my grandfather hitting us or striking us...(but) he could look at you with kind of a cold stare."
Rao said that Balzano's stare, and a few well-chosen words, could often get the point across to young Joey quicker than another parent's rebuke, or a spanking.
The Digest piece, "The Promise," goes from the way Grandpa used salt and pepper shakers, and his fist, to demonstrate an eclipse of the sun to 6-year-old Joey, to his vow that he would take the youngster to Florida to show him an eclipse in March 1970.
"Make a note on the calendar," Rao recalls Grandpa's words. "We're going. That's a promise."
Balzano, who bought Rao his first telescope and took him to the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan often, laid down the law to Joey when he was in danger of failing Spanish in grade school.
" 'That telescope is going out the window if your grades don't improve,' he later said to me with a stone cold stare," Rao recalled in his article. "'Bull!' he roared. 'You know the names of all the stars and constellations. What are they? Greek! Arabic! Latin! And you're telling me you can't learn Spanish?' "
Before their scheduled trip to the 1970 eclipse, Rao said, Grandpa had developed throat cancer, and his larynx was removed the day before the eclipse. When Rao visited him in the hospital and said that the next eclipse was July 1972 over the Canadian Maritimes, Grandpa wrote "WE'LL BE THERE!" on the slate, and smiled.
They made it, too.
"I would never forget that miraculous day -- or the man of blunted dreams who had awakened in me a deep awe of the universe, and a sense of my own possibilities."
Despite that and a subsequent case of a cancer wrapped around the aorta in his heart, Grandpa lived to the age of 84, dying in May 1993. By that time, Joey had begun a successful career as a broadcast meteorologist and expert on astronomy. He does a monthly column in Natural History and is a staff instructor and lecturer at the Hayden Planetarium.
Rao said that the Digest article came about almost by chance. After he had written a piece about the Hale Bopp comet last year, Brian Summers, one of the Digest editors asked him to rewrite it in the magazine's anecdotal style.
Over lunch with two Digest editors at magazine headquarters in upstate Pleasantville, "the other editor asked 'how did you get involved in this.' I got on to talking about my grandfather. The whole lunch, from the beginning right on through the entire lunch, seemed to be talking about (him.) "
The Digest passed on Rao's comet story and commissioned Rao to write the piece about Grandpa. Of editor Summers, Rao said, "It would have been very easy for him to simply either call me or e-mail or write me, saying, 'Sorry, this doesn't work.' He did not do that. I'm very happy that it worked out."
After graduating from City College of New York, Rao was hired by CompuWeather in June 1978, working there until October 1995 as a radio meteorologist for more than 200 stations. He also did reports for claim adjusters or lawyers.
Rao and his wife Renate, whom he met at CompuWeather and married in 1984 have two children, seven-year-old Joseph and four-year-old Maria. They have lived in Levittown since 1987.
Rao first appeared on News 12 Long Island in August 1988 as a fill-in weathercaster. He estimates he's on the Long Island cable channel only 20 or 25 times a year, yet he's still identified as "the News 12 weatherman" from places as remote as Hershey, PA and Vermont.
In addition to Joe's current work on News 12 Westchester in Yonkers, he and Renate have their own service called Skyway, Inc., based in Levittown. The astronomical and meteorological date service provides information to 200 subscribers across the country.
Skyway produces an astronomy flyer, which is available by subscription for $12 per year. Those who wish to obtain samples can send a self-addressed stamped business envelope to Skyway, Inc., P.O. Box 541, Levittown 11756-0541.