CATCH HIM IF YOU CAN

By ANDREW MCGINN

a.mcginn@beeherald.com

Yes. Evan Bunkers is that guy.

Placing him is the tricky thing.

He’s the guy who shows up every so often on Channel 5 to provide “Iowa’s most accurate forecast” in the tradition of such legendary central Iowa meteorologists as Mike Lozano, John McLaughlin and Ed Wilson.

But he’s also the guy who told you about the flotation device under your seat on that flight to Cancun.

He’s the guy who called out your name when your Venti-sized Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino was ready at Starbucks in Providence, Rhode Island.

He’s the guy who took your order last year, at the height of the pandemic, at a McDonald’s in Ankeny.

He’s the guy who works when he can for Grubhub and DoorDash.

He wants to be the guy who builds Jefferson’s first McDonald’s, and he wants to be the guy who takes those famous doughnut recipes and opens a Bunkers Dunkers in Des Moines.

A 2001 graduate of Jefferson-Scranton High School, Bunkers is living the best possible life — and what’s not to love about that?

“He is living, like, every dream,” Bunkers’ sister, Ellen Ritter, observed recently. “It’s cool.”

Even a couple of years after he began filling in as a meteorologist on WOI-TV, the Des Moines ABC affiliate, an Evan Bunkers sighting on Local 5 is still cause for disbelief: Wait a second. Evan Bunkers is the Channel 5 meteorologist? The kid from Jefferson?! The kid who used to be petrified of thunderstorms?

The one and only.

In fact, Bunkers will be back on air the weekend of April 17-18. He does his best to always add Jefferson to the weather map.

“I still, in my opinion, have a lot to learn,” Bunkers, 38, confessed during a recent chat over FaceTime. “The more you do it, the better you get at it. It’s just been recently that I haven’t gotten nervous going on air.

“People tell me, ‘Oh, you’re great.’ I don’t believe you.”

Despite what you might have heard, being a fill-in weekend weatherman doesn’t quite make one an instant celebrity, even by Iowa standards. To date, Bunkers said, he’s only been recognized once as that guy on Channel 5 — as he was going through security at the airport.

Sorry, but the TSA agent at Des Moines International just had to ask.

Bunkers’ main job is as a flight attendant for United Airlines based out of Chicago. Everything else is mostly, well, for fun.

And, yeah, it’s kind of complicated.

He works out of Chicago and has a house in Des Moines, but his primary place of residence is now Providence, R.I., his fiancee’s hometown. There, he takes the occasional shift at Starbucks because, well, “I always thought that would be a fun job.”

They packed up and moved across the country in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century, ’cause, why not? (The wedding is now set for October after multiple delays caused by Covid.)

For 15 years, Bunkers has flown the friendly skies, taking drink requests and making accommodations for passengers and their emotional support parakeets.

Well, there was just one emotional support parakeet. And it sat surprisingly still under the passenger’s seat in a little container.

Even after 15 years of flying, he’s still somehow never been to Australia. Or Fiji. Or Antarctica.

When asked about the latter, he concedes it’s because there are no public flights into Antarctica.

Now, would you believe Bunkers was once afraid of flying as well?

Even still, his sister wasn’t all that surprised when he graduated from Iowa State University in 2005 with a marketing degree, only to turn around and enter Continental Airlines’ training program for flight attendants.

“I can remember being in the car and he’d go, ‘Attention, passengers!’” Ritter recalled with a laugh.

On family trips, Evan was the one who could never get enough of the hotels, even when everyone else began thinking of home. And his sense of direction was almost parakeet-like.

Oddly enough, there are actually three Jefferson-Scranton alums who currently enjoy careers as flight attendants for United: Bunkers, classmate Jeanna Leistad and friend Jared Richardson, a 2003 Jefferson-Scranton grad.

Bunkers recalls once working the same flight from Houston to Minneapolis with Richardson during their Continental days (before its acquisition by United in 2010). That particular flight path took them right over home. From high above, they could see a familiar green water tower rising from the plain.

“I wonder how many times I’ve been to the moon and back,” Bunkers said, trying to estimate how many miles he’s flown.

After being furloughed in October due to the pandemic, Bunkers is set to resume flying this month.

Life in the jet stream

If nothing else, Bunkers’ life up to this point merely reaffirms the value of good people skills.

His almost certainly developed at Bunkers Dunkers, the family’s beloved local doughnut shop.

“My dad can talk to anybody and everybody,” Bunkers said. “I picked up on that working at the bakery.”

There’s surprisingly little turnover among flight attendants. Not just anyone can do it.

“They want someone the passenger can come up to and ask a question and not feel intimidated,” Bunkers said, describing a flight attendant as personable.

That same trait also seems to lend itself well to a career in television. After all, who wants a meteorologist who can’t engage in a little friendly banter before reviewing the day’s dew point?

Technically, Bunkers isn’t a meteorologist. Vanquishing a childhood fear of severe weather is one thing — the fear of calculus and physics is more of a lifelong condition. He is, however, working toward his broadcast meteorology certification from Mississippi State University.

Rather, Bunkers is just a guy who grew up glued to the Weather Channel who had the gumption a few years ago to email Local 5 chief meteorologist Brad Edwards and ask to intern during his downtime from flying.

It’s not totally unlike how Bunkers came to work at McDonald’s last year for a few months. As a kid in Jefferson — a community whose lack of a McDonald’s goes back to either an ancient curse or a lack of franchisee interest — he always thought it would be cool to be able to make your own Big Mac.

So one day last year, he decided to make that dream come true, too.

Despite being fascinated as a kid by weather — and apparently by Big Macs as well — Bunkers was equally terrified of it. No one has been more surprised than his sister to see him go from that to forecasting the weather and even chasing storms.

“This is not the kid I grew up with. Evan would just about make himself sick sometimes,” Ritter said of her brother. “Obviously, he turned it into a passion.”

Growing up, Bunkers would admittedly allow the weather forecast to dictate whether or not he was even willing to leave the house.

“Ooh, severe storms are coming in. I can’t,” he might say to a friend who asked him to come over.

“What a loser,” he now laughs.

Bunkers held onto that fear of weather until well into high school.

“Getting a driver’s license made the difference,” he explained. “The thinking was that I can move away from the weather. That gave me a sense of calming, even though being in a car is the worst place to be.”

If Bunkers could go back and tell his younger self anything, it would be that the likelihood of a tornado ripping Jefferson apart is lower than one might think.

“It’s hard to find a tornado,” he said.

One big perk of being a flight attendant is the ability to fly anywhere for free on standby. Bunkers especially likes to take advantage of that come severe weather season, making off for places like Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle, which he calls the “big leagues” of storm chasing.

Bunkers finally caught up with his first twister just two years ago outside McCook, in southwest Nebraska. He promptly did what any other self-respecting storm chaser would do: he posed for a selfie with it.

“It was the greatest feeling,” he said.

Bunkers said his childhood fear of weather can be traced directly back to the 1989 derecho that roared through Jefferson.

It was a derecho that roared back across Greene County last August with winds in excess of 80 mph. Specifically, Aug. 10, 2020, will long be remembered as the day that the equivalent of an inland hurricane shredded trees, flattened fields and crumpled grain bins like pop cans.

Ironically, Bunkers was the Local 5 weatherman on duty Aug. 9, the night before the storm.

The derecho was universally missed by meteorologists — Bunkers included. Most forecasting models showed nothing resembling the wind event that would take place. Except one. That led Bunkers to up his storm chances for Aug. 10 from 20 percent to 40 percent in time for the 10 o’clock newscast.

“Definitely should have gone higher,” he now says in retrospect.

“There’s no such thing as a perfect forecast,” he explained. “You just try to be the least wrong.”