Rainmaker, Rainmaker, Go Away

As the writer of a daily humor column in the Tulsa World, Troy Gordon gets a lot of calls from people who are trying to be funny, so he was not at all surprised, back in July 1962, when a man called up and said he could make it rain. To prove it, he said he would make it rain in Tulsa within 72 hours after any day and hour that Gordon cared to name. Gordon amiably agreed to specify a time, reported the incident in his column. Within the designated 72 hours, it rained. The local U.S. Weather Bureau office had predicted that no rain at all would fall in Tulsa that day.

The jokester did not call Gordon again for nearly a year. By then, Tulsa was thoroughly parched by the drought that has afflicted much of the Midwest and West this year. In June and again in early July, the man telephoned Gordon and promised to make it rain. Both times Gordon listed the agreed-upon dates in his column, and both times, contrary to Weather Bureau predictions, rain fell within 72 hours.

His curiosity aroused, Gordon found out as much as he could about the rainmaker. The man insisted on remaining anonymous, but he was willing to talk a little, in a negative way, about his methods: "I don't use any machinery, chemicals or hocus-pocus."

After the early-July rain, weeks went by without any rain at all in Tulsa. Then the rain man called Gordon once again, and they settled on a three-day span. This time Gordon told the local Associated Press man the story, and A.P. moved it to papers and radio stations all over the state. The eyes of Oklahoma were upon the skies as the first and second days passed without any rain, just as the Weather Bureau predicted. For the third day, the Weather Bureau forecast "a chance of light afternoon and evening thunder showers, with no more than one-quarter of an inch of rain."

On the morning of the third day, July 27, it started raining in Tulsa. It rained all afternoon. Rain fell faster than gutters and sewers could carry the water away. No deaths or serious injuries resulted from the flood, but property damage was extensive. Pavements buckled. Cars stalled in puddles. The goldfish pond at the zoo overflowed and all the fish disappeared. Hundreds of telephones went dead, 200 homes were evacuated. Rescue teams moved along city streets in rowboats.

When the downpour ended, the local Weather Bureau announced that nine inches of rain had fallen--an alltime 24-hour record for Tulsa.

It was presumably only a coincidence that last week, a few days after the Tulsa deluge, President Kennedy announced a change of command at the Weather Bureau. Francis W. Reichelderfer, 68, a Franklin Roosevelt appointee who has headed the bureau for a quarter of a century, is about to retire. His successor: Robert M. White, president of the Travelers Research Center, which does research in meteorology and other fields for Connecticut's Travelers Insurance Co. White is the very model of a New Frontier weatherman: a Bostonian by origin, a Harvardman, and only 40. He has never been in Tulsa.

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