Milkman of the Skies

The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, Inc. last week broke off its calculated yearning for the misty past to combat what seemed like an unbearably rainy future. Fearful that a Denver "carnival of harmony" would get washed out, the S.P.E.B.S.Q.S.A. went into district court and asked that Dr. Irving P. ("The Rainmaker") Krick be forced to turn off his baleful ring of cloud-seeding machines surrounding the city.

The singers withdrew the suit when Krick, an affable and convincing talker, assured them that it probably wouldn't rain anyhow. (Krick insists that he is only a sort of meteorological dairy hand who can only milk, not create, clouds.) But the incident dramatized the fact that Krick, almost overnight, has become one of the West's most controversial characters and that for better or for worse, rainmaking has come to stay.

Krick's method uses coke-burning generators which send silver-iodide particles skyward to increase precipitation. His theories of weather forecasting and rainmaking have been opposed by the U.S. Weather Bureau, Physicist Irving Langmuir, who started cloud seeding, and many another scientist.

On the other hand, enraged sections of the citizenry at large think Krick's methods are all too effective. They blame him for rained-out ball games, flash floods, dry spells, chicken-killing hailstorms, and all manner of crop damage. Beyond issuing a few over-the-shoulder rejoinders (sharp to the scientists, soothing to the citizenry), he pays little heed to such infidels, and goes on about his missionary work like Billy Graham gathering converts.

This month--only 13 months after his first commercial rainmaking job--he is employing a staff of 120 people, and has contracts to seed clouds over 330 million acres west of the Missouri River (an area ten times as big as New York State), plus sections of Mexico and San Salvador. This, he intimates happily, is only a beginning--he visualizes a time when a rancher may need only turn a dial in his house to regulate rainfall on his acres. But until that day comes, the West will have to do the best it can with plain old Krick water.

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