Tedi thurman biography of martin

She was a 5-foot-7 bombshell with a drawl that could melt the snow in Spokane.

The nation said goodbye Saturday to one of its most famous radio personalities – the Miss Monitor weathergirl Tedi Thurman.

While 89-year-old Thurman was laid to rest in the Midville cemetery, recordings of her 1950s weather reports were being belted over American airwaves and reminisced by famous commentators.

But those who grew up in the little Burke County town where Tedi Thurman was raised remember her as Dorothy Ruth, or better yet, Dot.

“Dot was just Dot,” said Midville resident Hogarth Sandeford, whose Trout Street house backed up to the Thurmans’.

He was three years her junior and caught rides to school with Dot and her mother in their Lincoln Continental.

“She even let me drive it once,” he said, pointing out that Dot’s father Ben Thurman Sr. owned the Bank of Midville and the local Ford dealership. “That car had air brakes.”

But the girl who would trade her name for Tedi and become an overnight sensation never tried to set herself apart in the town where she grew up.

“She was an ordinary girl who got along with everybody,” Sandeford said. “She was the artistic type, but we never would have guessed Dot would be famous.”

But she was. A huge American audience had been tuning in to Tedi Thurman since 1955 when she stepped onto the set of the NBC News weekend radio show, The Monitor, and swam through the forecast with a voice her followers would call sultry and sexy.

She would reel off the cities and temperatures in no particular hurry, always beginning with Atlanta … . her native capitol.

“(Tedi) would come into the studios and be there virtually every hour of the forty-hour weekend, with just a few breaks, and she would do weather with this lush music behind her,” author Dennis Hart said, as he described her on National Public Radio. “To say the least, Miss Monitor probab

Here she is — “Miss Monitor.”Her real name is Tedi Thurman — the woman who, in “Monitor’s” early years, gave weather forecasts in a manner that New York Times media critic Jack Gould described as “an irresistible invitation to an unforgettable evening.”

Tedi was a fashion model and actress who had appeared on several TV shows. That turned out to be her ticket to “Monitor,” where she gave weather forecasts for cities in a way that they’d never been given before — in an alluring voice with lush music playing in the background.

The first time you heard that presentation, you’d never forget it — or “that voice.” Listen here:

(The weather forecasts were real — except for the time when “Monitor” host Henry Morgan set Tedi’s script on fire from the bottom up. Then, she had to make up some of the temperatures.)

She was a smash hit on “Monitor” –– so much so that she appeared in a movie trailer for Dean Martin’s “Ten Thousand Bedrooms” flick as, yes, “Miss Monitor” (and thanks to Kent Coscarelly for that piece of information).

Editor’s note: Tedi Thurman died in Palm Springs in September 2012 at the age of 89.    I was privileged to meet her at the Monitor reunion in Manhattan in 2004 — several years after I had first talked with her by phone for my books on Monitor.  She was always, in a word, delightful.  She loved having been on Monitor and was, decades later, surprised that someone (me) was interested in chronicling the program.  She told me that she still had friends and acquaintances who remembered “Miss Monitor” — and who asked her to reprise the role at parties and other gatherings.

In the years after we met, she talked by phone often, and she always expressed her happiness that I had kept Monitor’s memory alive. I always, and