The Old Farmer's Almanac

I

by ROBB SAGENDORPH

ONE hundred and forty-one years ago on a frosty March evening, Abraham Weatherwist, the original weather prophet of The Old Tanner’s Almanac, from his shack on a Boston dump, squinted at the stars through the cracks in his roof and, after a few rapid calculations, predicted that July 13, 1816, a date sixteen months away, would bring with it “Rain, hail, and snow.” It did.

In 1952, armed with Old Abe’s secret formula handed down to me as tenth editor of the Almanac, I took a look at the plum tree in back of my Dublin, New Hampshire, farmhouse and concluded that in the latter part of June the following year there would be “a bad storm and that’s not all.”

My prediction hit the Worcester Tornado within a day — that town’s first in over a hundred years. These are only two examples of literally thousands of forecasts-come-true made out of Old Abe’s formula for The Old Farmer’s Almanac — which incidentally, is America’s oldest, continuously published periodical. But listen to these.

A postal from Grandma Dean of Hyannis, Massachusetts, dated July 23, 1956, tells me Cape Cod’s famed Outdoor Square Dance Festival, now in its eighth season, enjoyed its success this year “due to a great extent to your superhuman predictions.”

The natives of Saskatchewan, Canada, deluged my office this spring with congratulatory letters. The winter of 1955-56 had been truly the “worst in the 20th century” just as the Almanac had foretold it would be.

From the other side of the globe also came word that the natives of Penaguluru, Cuddapah, S. India, had been finding the predictions of the Almanac so accurate they had agreed to make its editor their holy man.

The United States Weather Bureau, which is considerably younger in years (it wasn’t founded until along in the 1850s), has had no such luck with weather prediction. For the most part it caters to an audience of unhappy and protesting people. I know this because a large part of my mail, also, consists of complaints about the Weather Bureau’s poor forecasting, with suggestions we do something about it. But, alas, except for the war years, when the Bureau prevailed upon the Office of Censorship to ban our forecasts, on the ground that these would be of value to the enemy, we have never had any official recognition.

There is another exception — that of the year 1936, when the editor of the Almanac decided to cast Old Abe and his weather verses aside and use instead a set of averages furnished by the Bureau. Sale of the Almanac dropped sharply and a greater howl was heard than that aroused by Teddy Roosevelt when he omitted the “In God We Trust” from the United States nickel.

I wasn’t the editor then. My turn didn’t come until 1939, at Boston’s exclusive Union Club, when I was asked if I would like to buy this publication, then thought to be moribund. I was a natural for the part. I had as much attraction for failures as a horse has for hay. In 1935 I had started a regional publication called Yankee with the inane idea of making a home for strictly New England literature. In four short years I had gained the nickname ‟Screwball” in addition to losing what now looks like a fair-sized fortune. Before that there had been an aspiration to write for a living. If anybody wants the four hundred short stories and four novels I turned out in those five years, I still have each and every one stored up in the attic with rejection slips to go with them.

I had also become associated in some people’s minds with such valiant lost causes as the League of Nations and the Republican Party; and along with Tom Mathews, then editor of Time magazine, I thought that poets were probably any nation’s most valuable citizens.

In any event, there on Beacon Hill, almost on the spot where in 1792 Robert B. Thomas had corrected the final proofs for the first edition of The Old Farmer’s Almanac, I was handed, along with two double martinis and a pen, the publishing contract for the 148th and future issues.

Out in the sun of Boston Common I glowed in the thought that I now owned a great American tradition. I had friends who ran newsstands, selling advertising was second nature to me, and here was printer’s ink I could bathe in up to my neck. The only gloomy aspect of the deal seemed to be that I knew about as much about almanac making as Eleanor Roosevelt knows about shoeing horses. It was also discomforting to realize that I was carrying with me a tattered account book in which I was learning too late that the esteemed and successful publisher who had just unloaded this lemon had been managing to lose over the past five years more money on it than I in a similar period had lavished upon my entire publishing stable.

What I didn’t realize at the time, of course, was that along this same Boston Common cow path, I was walking in the footsteps of most of the great American almanac makers. Here before me had strolled in 1639 William Pierce with his sheets of the first one of all. Here too had been Benjamin Franklin with his 1733 edition of “Poor Richard” as well as Nathaniel Ames (1708-64), whose almanacs outsold those of Franklin ten to one. It was here that Isaiah Thomas of Worcester, almanac and newspaper patriarch, refused to sell his almanac sheets to Robert B. Thomas, founder of The Old Farmer’s Almanac, and thus planted the seed of the competition which was later to destroy him.

2

WHERE Robert B. Thomas found old Abe Weatherwise I do not know, but he seems to have picked him up officially in 1806. Before that Abe had an almanac of his own in Philadelphia. From there he must have moved to Boston, for I have several editions of an almanac he published there. In one of these he tells of his close proximity to the weather in his shack on the Boston dump. None of his almanacs appeared, however, after Thomas began publishing, and beginning in 1806 Old Abe and Robert B. Thomas seem to have been inseparable partners.

The reliance of Thomas on this character for his predictions may be related to the tradition that most modern almanac makers observe: namely, that of avoiding any personal liability for forecasts.

This tradition dates back to the successful prediction, by two English almanac makers, of the great London fire of the seventeenth century. The populace, correctly or incorrectly, surmised that these two forecasters had set the fire so that their prediction would come true. So they were hanged by their necks to a roadside tree. The traditional for anonymity in forecast also goes back to sixteenth-century France, when almanac makers of the day were banished for not predicting what seemed best for the prevailing rulers: namely, the foretelling of the deaths or overthrow of others in power.

Not all almanac apocrypha, however, have to do with an editor’s desire to escape the guillotine. Benjamin Franklin, for example, deliberately foretold one year ahead the exact day, hour, and minute when his chief competitor would die. When the moment came and the competitor announced he was as alive and as healthy as ever, Franklin remarked that he was probably dead but didn’t know it.

Partridge, a famous English philomath, upon starting out from a country inn one bright sunny morning, failed to heed the advice of a stableboy that before night it would rain chickens and doves. It did and Partridge returned to the inn the next day to find out how the boy had been able to make such an accurate forecast. The stableboy’s reply was “Why, sir, I subscribe to the Partridge Almanac; and for telling the weather, if one goes by the opposite of what the Almanac says one is always right.”

With The Old Farmer’s Almanac the legend has been kicked around for years that Abraham Lincoln used it for the winning of his Armstrong Murder trial in 1858. Evidence damaging to Lincoln’s client had been introduced, to the effect that the moon at the time of the murder had been so bright that the murderer could easily see his victim. Lincoln, calling for an almanac (some say for the wrong year), easily proved to the jury that the moon had set by the time of the murder and in fact had been “riding low” all evening. An examination of most of the almanacs published in that time reveals The Old Farmer’s as the only one which carried the moonset at 11:37 P.M. along with the symbol which denotes it was riding low.

I started with a print order of 86,000 copies (a good many of which that first year — as they say in the trade — I had to eat), and Old Abe has been a wonderful stand-in for me in bringing the run up to its 1,100,000 for the edition of 1957. Many may wonder how it is that, in an age when so many traditions have been cast aside, an anachronism of this kind not only has survived but shows a handsome profit.

I wish there were or had been secrets which I could reveal here, but this would not be a valid account if I did so. The fact remains that the success of this almanac in recent years probably has as little to do with me as the political sagacity of Calvin Coolidge had to do with his becoming President. True enough, he worked at it and a Boston police strike swept him into the public eye. But the times were ripe for a man like Coolidge in public office and he just happened to be around. Just so, during the war years and those immediately following, the Almanac was to fill an American need for stability and nostalgia as well as humor. And I, like Coolidge, just happened to be the man at the tiller in these years. Since 1940, I might also add, there has been a tremendous growth in the field of what is somewhat broadly called “public relations,” and The Old Farmer’s Almanac seemed to make good copy for this fast-growing industry, particularly in radio and TV programming. I didn’t mind playing the fool by toting around stuffed ground hogs or pointing out, at risk of limb and life, just where and how hornets build their nests come August of each year. Upon occasion, also, I have been persuaded to versify some of Old Abe’s weat her sayings.

But playing the fool is not all that has gone into my almanac work. For Abe’s weather forecasts, I have had to set up a veritable Central Weather Intelligence Clearance Agency, which takes notes and collates for future use just about every important weather theory, article, book, and event the world over. Right now, for example, I can give you a rough idea of what is happening to ocean currents, the ice shelf, the jet stream, sunspots, and a hundred and one other elements which go into the making of our weather. And I do not overlook a certain rhythm of the universe which sooner or later every almanac maker comes to recognize. In these areas, the Almanac now holds a position of admiration, and even of respect, and is recognized by such leading meteorologists as Hurd Willett at M.I.T. and Dr. Rrooks at Harvard’s Blue Hill Observatory. In view of our unwillingness, however, to release the contents of Abe’s formula, no one would grant, nor would I expect, any substantial scientific support for this CWICA.

Without scientific, official, governmental, or even academic acceptance of its forecasts, it is perhaps difficult for some to accredit the Almanac with integrity or dependability. In fact most people greet its old yellow cover with, if not a loud guffaw, at least a knowing grin. Yet I have witnessed the vice president of a large Boston bank, Almanac in hand, hauling his expensive seventy-fool yacht out of the water long before the hurricane season, despite scientific assurance that he had no cause for worry.

I like to think that the Almanac is dependable.

As editor, my chief concern is actually with facts — astronomical and otherwise. Some 360,000 calculations with regard to eclipses, sunrise, sunset, tides, moon, planets — adjusted to some fifty cities and areas all over the United States — are only a part of each year’s grinding routine. In addition there are for each day in the year determinations of historical dates, holidays, holy days (for all religions). One slip could be fatal. For example, “February hath 29 Days,” printed at the top of the February, 1957, calendar page, slipped by me not only in the original copy but through three or more proofreadings, only to be caught by an observant press hand who was checking the quality of the ink.

There are also the agonizing details of newsstand distribution, late copy from advertisers, paper orders, financing, and seemingly a million and one decisions which come up almost daily with regard to deliveries, engravings, and copyrights. And each day I must answer seven or eight inquiries as to what kind of spring eastern Texas may expect, when is the best day in June for a garden party on the Hudson, the date of Easter Day in 1973, how to eliminate smog from the Los Angeles area or frosts from New England’s apple orchards in May, the effective cure for hiccoughs or unpleasant husbands, the meaning of a blue or green moon, as well as how to guarantee male offspring instead of female . . . and vice versa.

And you are probably asking just about now, How about this coming winter? Will it be colder, and with more snow than usual, or what? I blithely give you Abraham Weatherwise. He will tell you better than I.

“Haven’t made up my mind yet, folks. You see about now I usually can find some pretty good hints from the way the hornets are building their nests. When I find them high above the ground in southern exposures, that usually means lots of snow and cold weather ahead. But when they are close to the ground and facing north, I know there will be hardly any snow at all. This Fall I find the hornets have built them both ways. So until just about publication day, I really won’t know for certain.”

The old fox, I am bound to rejoin. He knows perfectly well we accepted and put to press his next year’s weather forecast way back last June. You will find it on any newsstand November 1.