Page 115 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

said, to drive away the rain). The deal included a 10 percent cut for Mrs. Sykes,
not for leading the prayers, as she had done in 1912, but for improving public rela-
tions by mixing pitchers of “Pisco Punch,” a legendary smooth and fruity drink
featuring Peruvian pisco brandy, made popular during the California gold rush.
Stingo sweet-talked the millionaire sponsors of this project, Joseph E. Wid-
ener, president of the Westchester Racing Association, and his female associate,
the “long, lissome, and lucreferous” Mrs. Harriman, whose critical weaknesses
included belief in the occult and “an inquiring mind.” Then he made his pitch:
“We, the U.S. Weather Control Bureau . . . agree to induct, maintain and operate
the Iodine Silvery-Spray and Gamma-Ray-Radio system” for a payment of $2,500
for each of two dry Saturdays and $1,000 for each intervening weekday, with a
forfeiture of $2,000 for every day it rained, the track to pay for the buildings
and labor. The rain suppressors stood to make $10,000 if every day was clear and
to lose $4,000 if it rained every day. They calculated the climatological odds as
0.7499 in their favor. 39
Soon Sykes began installing his equipment. The “Vibratory Units and the
Chemicalized Respository” were located in an abandoned clubhouse and the
“Detonary Compound” in a one-room, five-sided, windowless shed at the other
end of the track. Sprouting from the roof of the clubhouse were two rods of
shiny steel; inside were an old Ford Model-T engine serving as the Vibrator, an
impressive mass of wires, batteries, long rows of gaudy glass jars (probably filled
with colored water), and a washtub full of evil-smelling chemicals. The shed
looked like an ornate “cabalistic” pentagram covered with a spiderweb of wires.
Padlocked doors and security guards confronted the curious. As described at the
time by New Yorker racing columnist Audax Minor, “on the roof was a big five
pointed star strung with radio aerial wire and festooned with ornaments from
discarded brass beds and springs from box mattresses. The star always faces the
way the wind blows” (41). over the roof of the shed Sykes had constructed a
small platform where he could stand to “direct magnetic impulses” and conduct
the show.
The two buildings stood about a mile apart and were linked, as described by
Stingo, by the “Ethereal Conduit upon which traveled with the speed of Light
augmented 30,000-fold the initiatory Pulsations the Vibrator, and thence, via
the antennae, to the natural Air Waves and channeled Coaxial Appendixtum”
(42). The press played along for a while, publishing accounts of the mysterious
equipment and reporting Sykes’s claim that he had “one of the most powerful
radio installations in the Western Hemisphere,” which led local residents to
wonder if static electricity generated by the equipment was interfering with their
radio reception. A visit from representatives of the Federal Communications

98 | rain fakerS