Nineteen thirty was an auspicious year for the fifteen-day fall meeting at New York’s Belmont racetrack. Gallant Fox, the “Bear from Belair,” had just become the second horse ever to win the Triple Crown, and William Woodward hoped his classic three-year-old would go on to make himself the richest racehorse in American history by winning the Belmont’s Lawrence Realization. Also scheduled was the $125,000 Futurity, the horse race with the highest purse in the world and host to a group of talented two-year-olds including Equipoise, Epithet, and Mate.

The Westchester Racing Association’s president, Joseph Widener, and its secretary, John Coakley, were especially eager to provide their bettors with clear skies and fast tracks. They took the highly unusual step of hiring a professional rainmaker to keep the clouds away.

Even by racetrack standards, George Ambrosius Immanuel Morrison Sykes of Burbank, California, was an unusual person. He believed the earth was flat, estimated that the sun was thirty-three hundred miles away, and called himself a “minister of Zoroastrianism.” He had created a World Order of Zarathustra, opposed to free love, meat eating, prohibition, vivisection, and other evil practices. And he also operated his Weather Control Bureau.

Using his own special collection of “radio apparatus, antennae, and lightning coordinate grounds, cloud attractors and directors, integrators, and precipitators,” Sykes claimed he could control the weather through a process he called meteorolurgy, backed up by hydrolurgy (radio), thermurgy (temperature), pneumaturgy (wind), and ballisturgy (explosives).

The Belmont contract awarded Sykes cash every day rain clouds stayed away from the park, one thousand dollars for each clear day during the week, and twenty-five hundred dollars for each of the two Saturday meets that included the Lawrence Realization and the Futurity.

On the other hand, Sykes would pay the track two thousand dollars every day rain fell.

Sykes moved to Belmont Park and secretly set up shop. The New York Times described the scene: “He has placed [his machinery] in the old grand stand at the south corner of the park and has a sort of substation at the northern end, a wooden building with five sides, each 10 feet wide and 7 feet high. This structure has no windows, but gets light through a vent in the roof. Both buildings are covered with intricate wiring and are carefully guarded.”

“Nothing but bolts and bars and dozens of padlocks on the several doors confronted the hawk-eyes of the press,” W. J. Macbeth wrote in the Herald Tribune .

“The rain-control machine is very hush-hush,” Audax Minor noted in The New Yorker . “Both the negative and positive sections, which are interchangeable, are under guard.

“Then, too, there’s the big fivepointed star strung with radio aerial wire and festooned with ornaments from discarded brass beds and springs from box mattresses. The star always faces the way the wind blows.”

Monday, September 1—Opening Day—brought