FARMINGTON – Dennis Pike has taken the town’s temperature and measured the rain and snow that dropped on it for four decades.
Pike, finishing his fifth year as Franklin County sheriff, which counts among his four decades in law enforcement, is also in his eighth year as a Farmington selectman.
Despite the duties of those positions and other interests he’s involved in, Pike, a National Weather Service observer, manages with the help of his wife, Sheila, to check the temperature four times a day and report it two times a day to weather authorities.
Pike was working for Franklin County Civil Defense when the service was looking for a new observer, and he decided he’d try it.
Now 67, Pike moved to his home on Main Street in 1966 and also moved the weather station there from its former location on High Street at his parents’ home.
The only thing that changed, Pike said, was 13 feet of elevation.
It went from 420 feet above sea level to 433 feet above sea level.
For years, Pike used mercury-based and alcohol-based thermometers to tell the maximum and minimum temperatures. But in 1987, the system went electronic.
He still maintains the manual system and the two thermometers sit protected in a white enclosed, vented box in his side yard. The pole for electronic system stands nearby. He falls back on the manual system if the power goes out, which is not too frequently, Pike said Friday.
The electronic service gives you a more accurate figure to determine the degrees, he said.
A windmill with a snow measuring stake attached inside lends to the atmosphere but isn’t used.
The round rack that holds the precipitation collector at the station was empty Friday because he and his wife use a collector set up closer to their home during the winter.
Pike said they use an old-fashioned way of measuring snow usually taking a variety of six measurements and then melting snow.
For every 10 inches of snow, it equals 1 inch of rain, he said.
Interestingly, Pike said, most local “storms occur between 22 degrees and 32 degrees.”
But contrary to some beliefs, he said, it does snow in colder temperatures.
Pike said the more he got into doing the weather, the more interested he became.
“I enjoy it,” he said.
It is an undisputed fact that weather is the most discussed topic, he said.
He’s also happy to do what he dreamed of doing as a child.
“Since I was a little kid, I thought I wanted to be a cop,” he said. “I’m really blessed that I have been able to do what I wanted to do.”
And while doing a tour with the U.S. Army in the states, between the Korea and Vietnam wars, he always had the goal of getting back to Maine, and if he were successful, he said, he pledged to never leave again.
Pike has been married for 33 years to the “proverbial girl next door” and has three children, Angela, Michael and Carol and five grandchildren.
“Probably a great deal of my success,” Pike said, “can be attributed to my wife,” who has supported him in his ventures.
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