Page 114 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Next onstage was the director of ordnance, Dr. George Ambrosius Immanuel
Morrison Sykes, who would explain how barraging the clouds with cannon and a
rapid-fire Gatling gun would wring out their moisture. Then J. C. Hatfield him-
self, not a particularly eloquent or convincing man but a true believer in his tech-
niques, would mumble something about how Marco Polo had returned from
Cathay with an explosive yellow powder and stories of its use as a rainmaking
device in ancient China. Finally, it was up to Macdonald to close the deal (or set
the hook) by getting the local farm officials to sign a contract for “detonationary
services” with the Hatfield Rain Precipitation Corporation, at $10,000 an inch
of rain for up to 3 inches and $80,000 for a full 4 inches. Stingo confessed to
Liebling, “All first-class Boob Traps must contain a real smart Ace-In-The-Hole,”
and the rainmaking company’s consisted of converting weather bureau tables,
charts, and rainfall averages into a set of betting odds, a kind of pari-mutuel
handicapping that the company estimated to be 55 percent in its favor. He then
described how 5,000 people had turned out on a hot, dry afternoon to watch the
team set off the ordnance show, how Hatfield climbed the mountain like an old
Testament prophet, how Sykes’s spouse gathered the faithful together to pray for
rain, how the guns roared and the smoke billowed, how a storm came up at mid-
night and drenched the valley, how the rainmakers took credit for this, and how
the local populace subsequently prospered, praising Hatfield’s powers and paying
the rainmakers the $80,000. Macdonald’s cut was $22,000. The team repeated
the show, successfully, in oregon the next summer, but business tapered off in
subsequent years after the farm guild bought its own cannon (16–19).
We know from newspaper accounts that one of Stingo’s stories was based in
fact. In 1930, in the depths of the Great Depression and Prohibition, Stingo was
working the crowds at Belmont Park, living by his wits, and writing a horse-racing
column for the New York Enquirer, an unpaid position but one that kept him in
circulation. During a rainy week in early September, he spotted his old comrade
in rainmaking, Sykes—now a “minister of Zoroastrianism,” a flat-earther, and
another Wizard of oz—who was in the process of trying to convince the track
officials (and other “solvent boobs”) that his California-based U.S. Weather Con-
trol Bureau could prevent rain during the racing season and save the track from
bankruptcy (29–35). Sykes, who used neologisms freely, claimed that he con-
trolled the weather through “dynurgy, xurgy, psychurgy . . . isogonic force, quan-
tumie . . . Bolecular energy, freenurgy—especially freenurgy . . . and thermurgy.” 38
Soon Stingo and Sykes were back in business as equal partners: Stingo was
to run the office, calculate the odds of rain in September, do most of the talking,
and close the deal; Sykes would act as the incomprehensible true zealot and set
up and operate his mysterious rain machine (which could be run in reverse, he

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