Meteorologist Rick Shanklin, a Christian County native, is retiring from the National Weather Service in Paducah after 37 years with the agency. Saturday, July 31, will be his last day at work.
For much of his tenure, Shanklin has been the “face and voice” of NWS in this region, the Paducah office wrote in an article celebrating his career. His roles as warning coordination meteorologist and media spokesman made him one of most visible employees in the Paducah office.
In a 2013 story that ran in the Kentucky New Era, Shanklin described how the EF3 tornado that caused massive damage across Christian County in 1978 also helped spark his career.
“It moved through the central part of the county and damaged our farm,” Shanklin told a reporter. “That was the icing on the cake for sparking my interest in going into meteorology.”
A graduate of Christian County High School, Shanklin earned a bachelor’s degree in meteorology in 1983 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
A year later, he landed his “dream job” as a meteorologist intern at the NWS in Jackson, Kentucky. It was like being a “kid in a candy shop,” he said in the NWS article.
After stints in Paducah, Louisville and Mississippi, he returned to Paducah in 1994.
Shanklin led storm survey work following tornadoes and severe thunderstorms for 27 years in the Paducah NWS region. This included six EF4 tornadoes — and the deadliest tornado in the region in modern history, the Nov. 6, 2005, tornado at Evansville, Indiana, that killed at least 24 people.
In April 2006, he was in Christian County frequently to update the public and local officials on a pair of tornadoes just north of Hopkinsville that caused extensive property damage and injured 29 people.
Shanklin is mentioned or quoted in at least four dozen New Era stories in the last 15 years.
In retirement, Shanklin plans to spend time with family, including grandchildren in Tennessee and Florida. He said he will also have time for ministry work after earning a ministry degree in 2018.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
