Former Channel 3 weatherman remembered fondly at service

Then he beat away at the drums with the rest of the band at Canyon Ridge Christian Church, playing "Take it to the Limit" by the Eagles.

It was the song that Fredericks himself chose for the memorial.

It’s a song about loneliness and dreaming – about a person who can’t "seem to settle down."

"So put me on a highway

And show me a sign

And take it to the limit one more time."

It couldn’t have been a more fitting send-off for a man who at one time had thousands of fans on the air. He had wit. He had a joke of the day. He had a fact of the day. He had a love for animals, which he espoused on the air and in the community. And he had the weather, a popular topic for TV watchers.

But off camera, he faced the death of his golden lab, Jordan, in 2007, and then his own impending death from cirrhosis.

More than 200 people showed up for Fredericks’ memorial Saturday to honor the man and, yes, his dog.

Fredericks brought the weather news to Southern Nevadans for more than a decade, starting in 1995. And he did it with Jordan, red bandana and all.

Some of the viewers tuned in just to see the dog and didn’t give a hoot about the scorching temperatures of the day, according to friends and acquaintances.

"Damn dog," muttered Casey Smith jokingly at the memorial. He was a close friend of Fredericks and a weatherman for a competing station, KLAS-TV, Channel 8. "When I first got the job here, and I went back to Monterey, they asked me, ‘How does it look? How’s the job gonna be?’ And I told them, ‘I’m going to be competing against a dog.’ "

When Jordan died, a part of Fredericks went with him. Even though he ended up getting another dog, Little Jordan, who was at the memorial service, things would never be quite the same.

Fredericks eventually lost his job and became homeless in Montana. He came back to Las Vegas, and on Nov. 23 died at the Nathan Adelson Hospice at age 57.

Good friend and brief broadcast cohort Madeleine Holland Simmons, in perhaps one of the most moving eulogies for Fredericks, said his bad times started with the death of his mother.

"She died of brain cancer on his 21st birthday," she explained, promising not to cry during her farewell. "She was 52 years old."

She said his mother gave him a birthday card that was his most prized possession.

He even wrote about his mother in his memoirs. Holland Simmons read a segment at Saturday’s memorial: "She was my mom: Sweet, caring, loving. She lived by the Golden Rule."

And that rule is to treat all as you’d like to be treated.

Fredericks, who was born John Frederick Alden in San Jose, Calif., on June 5, 1955, managed to live by that rule, according to friends and co-workers at the service.

When viewers reached out, he reached back, in some cases inviting them to the studio for a tour or even managing to bring aspiring student broadcasters on the air from time to time.

His friends and co-workers said he was the life of the station, coming up with various nicknames for his colleagues while creating what remains to this day a common salutation around Channel 3: "Hernt!"

By definition, the obscure utterance is delivered to make the previous speaker feel as though what he or she just said was "unimportant" or "lacked humor." Fredericks turned it on its ear and made it a goofy form of "hello." Everybody embraced it over time.

Fredericks now rests beside Jordan in a Las Vegas pet cemetery.

Contact reporter Tom Ragan at tragan @reviewjournal.com or 702-224-5512.