Page 162 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

the rainmaker of yore

The public had not yet heard about cloud seeding in September 1946 when
the midwestern novelist and screenwriter Homer Croy reminisced in Harper’s
Magazine about the rainmakers of his youth. The article was an instant anachro-
nism: “one day when I was just a boy, my father said, ‘Get ready and we’ll go to
town and see the rainmaker.’ No work! Maybe a candy mouse. Maybe some ‘lick-
orish.’ . . . There were always wonderful things to be had in town. It was not long
before we were in the hack and jogging along the dusty road. There, on each side
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of us, was the suffering, gasping, dying corn.” Croy recalled that in the 1890s,
especially during times of drought, many people sought the services of rainmak-
ers. He and his family gathered that day with other citizens at the railroad depot
where the Rock Island Railroad had sent its rainmaker to work his magic from a
specially equipped boxcar. There was

a great stirring inside the mysterious car and in a few minutes a grayish gas (that
was going to save our corn) began coming out the stove-pipe hole in the roof. In no
time the gas hit our noses—the most evil-smelling stuff we had ever encountered.
But if it took that to make it rain, why, all well and good, we could stand it. The
theory, as most of us knew by this time, was that this gas went up and drops of
moisture coagulated around the particles and down came the rain. . . . It seemed
simple and logical to us. Up went the gas and up went our eyes and up went our
hopes . . . sometimes it took only two or three hours, sometimes it took two or
three days. (215)

But by the end of the afternoon, only a little cloud, “about as big as a horseblan-
ket,” appeared and suddenly disappeared in the otherwise cloudless sky. Croy
and his family returned home that evening disappointed but not disillusioned.
As they prepared for bed, they heard, on the tin roof of the shed, a hopeful pit-
ter-pat that soon became a downpour—the soaking rains had started. The next
morning “everything in all the world was all right. The drought was broken. And
we knew why it had been broken. . . . And we were thankful to God for the won-
derful man who had come among us” (217).
In his essay, Croy relegated these events to the gullibility of a bygone era, con-
cluding, “There is now not a farmer in all the corn belt who believes in rainmak-
ers. . . . It hardly seems possible today that I once went to town to see a rainmaker
save our crops, but I believed in it then and so did most people” (220). The tim-
ing could not have been more ironic. Croy’s article was published in Harper’s

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