I may have told this story on the board a few years back but thunderstorms with lots of lightning brought back this memory. I'm 63. When I grew up in Baltimore in the 1960's and eary 70's there was no weather radar. Other than hourly obs it was very hard to tell where thunderstorms were. Most phone calls were long distance so a phone call of 50 miles was long distance and charged to your phone. Transistor radios were very popular and on the AM dial 530 was a great place to listen for the distinct static that lightning produced. So I would listen intently in the afternoons to the frequency and how loud the static were and if they were getting louder or softer. That gave me a crude way of forecasting storms although I never knew exactly where they were. I kept a chart and called them "SPM's" statics per minute.
Okay, too much weenie info but I was "that weird kid" when it came to getting excited about severe or unusual weather