The Press: Abe Weatherwise

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Christmas Day, 1948 will be "unpleasant with rain or snow," and New Englanders may as well face it. Abe Weatherwise says so. For a century and a half, the meteorologist of the Old Farmer's Almanac has been predicting the year-round weather, and for all its radar and radio balloons, the U.S. Weather Bureau has never been able to woo his fans away. His forecast for the coming winter is a moderately pesky one:

Icy. Winter of 1948-49 will not be as cold on the whole as the winter just past. However .. . there will be frequent storms of rain and sleet as well as snow which will create unusually icy conditions.

The Almanac goes to press before any of the usual seasonal signs appear: the nut stores of squirrels, or woollybear caterpillars (TIME, Nov. 8). Mr. Weatherwise just hauls off and predicts.* How in tophet does he do it? This week, in the New York Times Magazine, Almanac Publisher Robb Sagendorph, who does business in Dublin, N.H., stuck his Yankee tongue in his cheek and drawled a few clues.

"A completely fictional character he is," wrote Sagendorph, "but . . . frankly, Abe Weatherwise is a mainstay around the office." The Almanac had left Abe's forecasts out just once, in 1938: sales flopped, subscribers howled, and it will never happen again.

"Abe's formula is just as secret now as it always has been. Over the years knowledge, theories, the results of experiments brought by travelers to the Indies, to far off China, Australia, Europe and Africa—and just across Boston's Charles River—all this he has added to his own native wisdom ... But he has never mixed ... in his formula."

Abe, who couldn't exist without Sagen-dorph and his staff, "may forecast that a particular day will be 'warm.' He never says how warm it will be ... I'm not sure our definitions would be accepted in official weather circles. Abe defines rain as any precipitation which will spatter off a bald man's head. Snow means you can see a cat's tracks across the barn roof. These are meaningful definitions, but the specialists down at the Weather Bureau would probably have to hold their sides to keep from laughing." Funny, though, says Sagen-dorph, how often Abe Weatherwise has the last laugh.