Page 112 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Hatfield and the U.S. Weather Bureau had never been on good terms,
although he knew the local officials personally and was a heavy user of weather
bureau data, maps, and forecasts. He typically took contracts in areas that had
experienced lower than normal precipitation and worked in seasons when rain-
fall might be expected to occur. This combination ensured that the local citizenry
was desperate for rain, increased the chances of getting a contract, raised the price,
and bettered the odds that average or above-average rainfall—for which Hatfield
could take credit—was just around the corner. In 1918 Ford Ashman Carpen-
ter, the weather bureau station manager in San Diego and Los Angeles, looked
back on several decades of attempted rainmaking in southern California. With-
out naming names (but clearly alluding to Hatfield), Carpenter recalled that the
rainmaker “possessed a limited education” and lacked the ability to differentiate
cause from effect. Using a system of “no rain, no pay” but still always collecting
his expenses in advance, the rainmaker typically operated in the rainier months
of January and February, after a dry autumn. Carpenter concluded that by far the
most important feature of the rainmaker’s work consisted of playing on the cre-
dulity of the people: “It is therefore a psychological rather than a meteorological
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problem, for the fundamental factors are those of the mind and not of matter.”
It is in this sense that Hatfield served as the model for Starbuck in the Broadway
play The Rainmaker (1955). He was even invited to its Los Angeles premiere.

betting on the Weather

In the early 1950s, more than $2 million in legal claims were filed against New
York City by upstate residents for purported damage caused by the cloud-
seeding efforts of Dr. Wallace E. Howell over the Catskill Mountains reservoirs.
Although the lawsuits were eventually dismissed because of technicalities, an
elderly raconteur and bon vivant, Colonel John R. Stingo, who often referred to
himself as “the Honest Rainmaker,” was astonished that men of science at that
time were becoming targets of damage suits and hard feelings, when decades ear-
lier his own rain-inducing efforts had generated nothing but good feelings for all
involved. The noted New Yorker columnist A. J. Liebling caught up with Stingo
(whose name means literally “strong brew”) at a series of Manhattan watering
holes and heard his creatively embellished, colorful, improbable, and possibly
misleading stories of how in yesteryear he had lived by his wits and bet with the
odds (but never with his own money) on prizefights, on the horses (when betting
at the track was outlawed), and, of course, on the weather. For him, rainmaking

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