Melinda Mayo stood in the muddy March air, staring down at what Mother Nature was capable of at her worst. She had finished a shift at KATV Channel 7 and already returned home when the sirens went off.
Little Rock’s 2023 cyclone flirted with EF4 power, and Mayo felt every bit of that in the soggy aftermath, the humidity so thick it formed a halo on the camera lens and settled as mist over the wreckage. It was enough to put a faint yet perceptible wobble into her voice as she broadcast against a backdrop of utter devastation set to a soundtrack of emergency vehicles.
“I had never gotten to a tornado scene so quickly,” she said. “When I heard the tornado siren here at my house, that’s all hands on deck. I just looked at my husband and said, ‘I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go find a photographer and get live somewhere.’ We were able to get to the businesses that had been hit, as well as the Colony West neighborhood, where people were still just getting out of their homes.
“People were literally walking up the street with suitcases, trying to figure out where they were going to stay that night. You could still smell natural gas in the air. I think that’s what probably affected me so much. I was there so quickly, and it was so fresh.”
Even as Mayo recounts the event and those like it, all lived as part of a 39-year career in media, her retirement clock continued to tick down. For the first half of her life, she did not chase the weather. Like the rest of us, the weather found her. One of her earliest memories was watching her father activate the time-honored “Dad method” of gauging a storm.
“Back in the day, when it was on a night that would have that juicy feeling to the air, Tom Bonner and Ron Sherman were on TV, doing their best to pinpoint the rotation, which was so elementary compared to what we have now,” she said. “[Dad] would go outside and look up at the sky, and when he felt like the time was right, he would say, ‘OK, let’s go.’ That meant we all got in the family station wagon, and we would drive to my grandmother’s house south of Pine Bluff because they had a storm cellar.
“We would all go down in the storm cellar with Grandma’s canned peaches and purple hull peas and stay down there until Dad and my grandfather thought it was safe for us to come out. Now I know that was the worst thing we could have possibly done, get in the car and drive 20 minutes away, but back then, you just didn’t know what you didn’t know.”
By her teens, Mayo had developed a love for writing and, upon graduating from Pine Bluff High School, was bound for Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Trinity Foundation Scholarship in hand. Eschewing an early thought of premed, she studied communications under the late William David Downs Jr., “my teacher, mentor and friend,” as she described the professor in a blog post commemorating his 2019 passing.
“He taught me so much as a journalist, ‘Trust no one. Assume nothing,’ and as an interviewer, ‘Melinda, QUIT TALKING,’ which was a lesson in shutting up and helping my subject open up.”
Finishing her Bachelor of Arts in broadcast journalism at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, she started hustling to find a job, landing a spot at KARK Channel 4 as an overnight photographer. Her career began with an ear glued to the scanner, listening for fire calls or police actions, to which she would lug the equipment to the scene.
“For a little 21-year-old girl who couldn’t even carry the big cameras we had back then, that was not an easy job to do,” she said. “I think they were testing me to see how much I really wanted this career, but it was a foot in the door.”
Mayo moved into various production roles from there, including editing video and producing stories. Then, as weekend producer in 1990, the weather again crossed her path.
“In 1990, a flood hit downtown Hot Springs that sent cars just rolling down the street,” she said. “It was like 10, 10:30 at night when that started happening. I looked at one photographer, and he looked at me, and he said, “We’re the only ones here. We better go,’ so we went, and I covered that — stayed up for two days straight, telling the stories of these businesses and homes that had been flooded.”
Mayo still did not jump to weather. Having earned a spot-news reporting award from the Associated Press for the Hot Springs story, she was now living a life on-air. She remembers the heady days covering former President Bill Clinton’s run to the White House and how, later, when he came back to visit former Sen. David Pryor in the hospital following surgery, she got the drop on the entire media pool.
Photo courtesy of Melinda Mayo
“The whole press corps was there when he came out, and they’re yelling questions, probably about Monica Lewinsky and who knows what else,” she said. “I just kept saying, ‘How’s the senator?’ because I knew he would want to talk about David Pryor. He finally heard me, looked straight at me and gave me his little grin and a thumbs up and said, ‘He’s doing well.’
“I said, ‘What did you tell him?’ and he said, ‘I told him that we love him, we’re praying for him, and we’re working for him to have a better Arkansas when he gets out,’ and he shut the car door and took off. The whole press crowd stopped and looked at me like, ‘Who is this local girl who gets the interview?’”
She pulled the same maneuver during a memorable encounter with Johnny Cash at a press event publicizing the singer’s proposed theater venue in Branson. At its conclusion, Cash headed for his getaway car while Mayo broke ranks from the press corral and sprinted across a grassy lot to get within earshot.
Photo courtesy of Melinda Mayo
“I said, ‘Johnny! Mr. Cash! Do you want to say hello to Arkansas?’” she said. “He said, ‘Yeah, I want to say hi to Arkansas,’ and he stopped and talked to me for a little bit. We talked about Branson and why he wanted to be there. We talked about country music and why it’s important. By then, some of the other reporters hijacked the interview, but here again, being someone from Arkansas sometimes works for you.”
Eventually, however, the seed idea of becoming a meteorologist finally began to take root leading Mayo to take correspondence courses through Mississippi State University. While taking the three-year course, she started doing the weather in 1995, a transition Mother Nature showed up to congratulate her for dressed as Hurricane Opal. Mayo was on vacation in Florida when the storm made landfall, and she reported live on the evacuation and storm damage from the scene.
“We don’t get a lot of hurricanes in Arkansas,” Mayo told AY About You magazine in 2023. “It was exciting to experience the storm and warn people.”
In early 1996, Mayo joined KATV, where she would firmly solidify herself as Arkansas broadcasting royalty. Finishing her MSU coursework in 1998, she became the first female broadcast meteorologist to appear on Arkansas television. Her gig with Channel 7’s weekday morning show, Daybreak, ran for 26 years making her the longest-running morning show personality in the state’s television history. She said it was an easy transition going from reporting on weather events’ aftermath to forecasting them in advance, and her roots in reporting helped her develop a voice that was different from others around the dial.
“I began as a storyteller, and that’s something I love,” she said. “I just started seeing things happening in the weather and thought, ‘Wait a minute. I can really tell this story well too. If I can explain school desegregation cases, I can explain why it’s going to rain.’”
That brings the tale back to 2023, the year of the Little Rock tornadoes, by which time Mayo was already talking about retirement, saying the hours and demands were finally starting to get to her. The decision was hastened and ultimately solidified by a diagnosis of mild early multiple sclerosis that was beginning to infringe upon her work.
“That started a new kind of journey for me about two years ago, when I started noticing some hoarseness in my voice,” she said. “Then, about six months ago, I started feeling little twitches, sort of like when your eyelid will twitch when you’re tired and nobody else notices or sees it, but you know it’s there. When that started happening, I said, ‘Eh, better go check it out and see what a neurologist has to say,’ so after a couple of months of testing and lumbar punctures and all kinds of fun stuff like that, they diagnosed me.
“I’m very positive about it. I’ve started medication, but one of the things needed is good rest. Like, your brain needs a whole night’s sleep, so my husband and I sat down, and we were thinking [retirement] was close anyway, and he said, ‘You know what? Let’s just take better care of you,’ so that’s what I’m going to do. That’s No. 1 on the list is to start taking better care of myself.”
Mayo will be a youthful 60 when she signs off for the last time in April and was far too modest to refer to herself as a pioneer in the market. Yet, given her status as the first female television meteorologist in Arkansas — and the longest-tenured, at that — plus all the awards, headlines, community service work and lives touched over nearly 40 years, no other term feels adequate. Besides, if such an accolade represents not only saving people in harm’s way through her work but inspiring other little girls and young women to follow in her footsteps, it is a title she’s happy to have.
Mayo’s run at KATV, starting in 1996, made Arkansas TV history.
“I’m not the kid who wanted to be a meteorologist from 5 or 6 years old. I didn’t think about doing meteorology for years because I didn’t see other women doing it,” she said. “In that respect, I’m proud that I’ve been able to encourage girls to think of jobs they didn’t think about 20, 30 years ago. It’s not just boys who are good at math and science; girls are, too, and for any girl out there who thinks this is what you want to do, then go for it.
“That was how I ultimately decided back then that this is where I needed to be. The weather was my lane — I’d just detoured a little bit through news first. If I have been an encouragement to girls in STEM saying, ‘Hey, these science- and technology-type jobs? You absolutely can do that,’ then I’m so glad I did.”
Listen to Melinda talk about being featured on the cover of Arkansas Money and Politics on 103.7 The Buzz below.
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Feature photo by Lori Sparkman
