Longtime Fox 5 meteorologist Jeff Hill is retiring after 26 years at Fox 5 (WAGA-TV), he announced on social media Monday.
His final day on air is Sept. 27, he said.
“Now before you start thinking about any conspiracy theories, it was my and my lovely wife’s decision to call it quits,” he wrote on his public Facebook page Monday. “The fine folks at Fox 5 wanted me to stay, but my nagging desire to play more golf and catch more fish won out in the end.”
Hill, in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said at age 61 and after 37 years in the business it was time to wrap it up at the conclusion of his contract.
“I feel like it’s time to move on,” Hill said. “I’m young enough to do something if I want to. Or not, if I don’t want to.”
He has worked at Fox 5 (WAGA-TV) since 1998.
“The best thing I’ve gotten out of this is the personal interaction with the viewers,” Hill said. “We hopefully help people on a daily basis who tune in and trust us. It’s satisfying when people in public thank you for that. It’s always been about them, not me. I am not that way.”
Hill grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, then moved around as a teen, graduating high school in Pittsburgh before getting a degree in meteorology at Penn State. His first TV forecasting job was in Sioux City, Iowa, before moving to stations in Richmond, Virginia; Pittsburgh and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. After losing his chief meteorology gig at Raleigh-Durham in 1998 following a management change, Fox 5 called him and he landed a weekend job there.
He later did “Good Day Atlanta” for several years with Mark Hayes and Suchita Vadlamani. He put in his name for the chief meteorologist job after Ken Cook retired in 2014, but David Chandley ended up with the gig. More recently, Hill was doing weekdays. “I joked it was the preretirement slot,” he said. “I had banker’s hours.”
He said over the years, as Fox 5 added more local news, he had to be on TV more and social media and streaming broadcasts have kept him busier than ever.
“I love it,” he said. “But let’s face it. It’s shift work. You have to fill in for people. You have to be there at a certain time. It gets old.”
Cook, who was Fox 5′s chief meteorologist for many years, said Hill’s background in Pittsburgh “brought a lot of winter weather knowledge from living there. … Jeff is easy going and easy to work with, and what you see is what you get.”
Hill has been married for more than 30 years to Tracey, who he met in Richmond, and has two adult daughters who now live up north.
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