Weather recorder excelled at task: Woman dies after six decades of dependable advice

Farmers relied on her reports about rainfall and the ebb and flow of the East Fork White River for years.

School bus drivers knew to start a little earlier in the morning based on those reports, published in The Tribune and broadcast on local radio stations.

They’ll have to find her helpful information elsewhere now.

Ruth Everhart, a long-time observer for the National Weather Service, died Saturday morning. She was 92.

Everhart’s morning calls to the weather service started Nov. 1, 1947, and continued through this fall with only rare breaks. Some of those gaps were weather-related, as in when her family pulled her from her home during near-record flooding along the East Fork White River in June 2008.

That flood claimed part of Everhart’s home off County Road 760 East, just north of Seymour in the Rockford area.

For nearly 65 years, she recorded the high and low temperatures, precipitation and river levels, reporting that information to the National Weather Service in Indianapolis and sharing it with readers of The Tribune and area radio listeners.

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