Norm Dvoskin, longtime News 12 meteorologist, dies at 93

As one of the founding meteorologists of News 12 Long Island, where he forecasted for three decades, Melville’s Norm Dvoskin weathered many a storm — both literal and metaphoric.

Known for delivering quips with his prognostications, he once recalled in an unpublished essay how a viewer from Syosset told him, "Knock off the jokes and stick to the weather.” One Gordon Heights cleric, he said, threatened to picket the station after Dvoskin joked, “I’m afraid of heights — Roslyn Heights, Wheatley Heights and Gordon Heights!”

But positive letters balanced things out. “You are quite an asset to the news,” one viewer wrote. “I can hear the weather on any channel, but cannot hear your jokes.” Wrote another, “You make every day sunny. … You make weather fun.”

Dvoskin, who began with News 12 in December 1986, just days before it launched, and remained until retiring in 2016, died of natural causes Sunday at Plainview Hospital, his family said. He was 93.

“I was proud to call him a mentor and colleague,” Long Island native Geoff Bansen, chief meteorologist at ABC affiliate WLNE in Providence, Rhode Island, wrote Sunday on Instagram. They had met when Bansen interned at News 12. When the young man returned years later to become News 12’s weekend-morning meteorologist, Dvoskin called him to say “how proud he was that I had continued my dream and made it back to the station…. It meant so much to me to have that come full circle,” Bansen wrote.

At home, “He was a family man and we had such a great childhood,” said his daughter, Alicia Dvoskin Moya, of San Diego, the eldest of his and his late ex-wife Joan Meyer Dvoskin’s three children.

“We belonged to Piquet Lane [tennis and swim club] in Woodbury,” and the family would go there often, Moya said. Her father “was a tennis player, a volleyball player, a softball player. And he loved Cuban culture and music, even as a kid.” An avid Latin dancer, “He would go to the city with his four women dancing friends until just recently.”

As well, he had been a Giants fan since the NFL team’s days at the Polo Grounds. “He just watched the Thursday-night football game,” in which the Giants played the Dallas Cowboys at MetLife Stadium, said his daughter. “My last text  to him was: ‘Go Giants.’” He also was an Islanders hockey fan, attending games at Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale since the team’s founding in 1972.

Norman David Dvoskin was born Sept. 4, 1931, in Manhattan, and raised in the Bronx, the youngest child of Russian-Jewish immigrants Morris Dvoskin and Bertha Muskatt Dvoskin. The eldest brother, Aaron, died in 1974; the next eldest, Henry, died in childhood. After Morris Dvoskin, a successful carpentry contractor, died in 1940 at age 40, the family’s fortunes changed, with Bertha having to take in a boarder to help make ends meet. She later remarried.

Norman attended the elite public Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, and eventually went on to earn a master’s degree in meteorology from New York University in 1954. He first worked for the Air Force Cambridge Research Center in Hanscom, Massachusetts, before joining the Fairchild Guided Missiles Division in Wyandanch in 1958. That year he married Meyer, and moved first to East Meadow and later Plainview.

Dvoskin moved to Syosset and then Melville after the couple divorced in the mid-1970s.

In 1960 he had begun his long stint at Grumman Aerospace Corp. in Bethpage, analyzing the effects of meteorological events on the firm’s products and projects.

A hiccup occurred in October 1970, when he was one of two men arrested for allegedly forging bail-bond documents. But, said his daughter, the two were patsies for the scheme of Dvoskin’s brother-in-law who fled the country. “So they arrested my dad to try to force him to find out where my mother’s brother was, and then let him go.”

He was never charged, she said, and indeed he continued up the ranks at Grumman. Rising to senior analyst — and serving as vice chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s New York City branch for a time beginning in 1979 — he accepted a buyout in 1990 and retired from that career.

By then he was well into his sideline at News 12, initially as a weekend forecaster, after having apprenticed for no money — and, later, gas money — at the Smithtown TV station WSNL/67 (now WFTY).

His News 12 tenure was characterized by a wit that included zeroing in on specific Long Island streets in his on-screen graphics, in an early example of “hyperlocality,” and being primary contributor to the American Meteorological Society’s “Partly to Mostly Funny: The Ultimate Weather Joke Book” (2014), distributed by The University of Chicago Press. A collection of his “Weather Wit” columns in the Association of American Weather Observers’ newsletter was published in 1994.

In addition to his daughter, he was survived by a son, Gary Dvoskin, of Melville, and another daughter, Karen Dvoskin, of Dix Hills; and two grandchildren. Brenda Conrad, his longtime companion, died in 2010.

A service will be held at 2 p.m. Tuesday at the Woodbury funeral home Gutterman’s.