Gordon Clouser was born in 1912, in Gibraltar, Pennsylvania. He grew into his teens as an active, good-looking boy with many diverse interests. Quick to learn, he finished high school at fourteen. His family moved to New Mexico, where he worked several years as a surveyor, then took two degrees at the University of New Mexico. After that, he had many activities—teacher, librarian, writer and director of plays. He made a movie, composed music, wrote poetry, was in the Air Corps reserve one year, taught meteorology and aeronautics at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle for a year and a half. He learned to fly in Idaho and then was a teacher in Junior College in Yakima, Washington.
It was 1950 when Gordon became excited about the work that was being done in rainmaking in many parts of the country. By April of the next year, he had moved to Plainview, Texas, and had begun to organize airplane operations to prevent hail on the high plains of the State. Having developed his own secret formula for the chemicals to be dropped into thunderstorm clouds, he experimented in his car, in airplanes and in the home freezer. Once he came home for dinner, carrying some denim to be used in connection with an experiment, and his wife discovered that he had taken all the food out of the freezer so he could drop chemicals in it, to see what might happen in the atmosphere. When he asked what they were having for dinner, she replied, “I guess it will be frozen denim.”
The year 1951 was not an easy one for Clouser. The thought of preventing hail was new to most people and he had some difficulty in getting enough money to finance the necessary plane operations. He asked farmers for twenty to forty cents an acre for protection from hail and compared this cost with the much higher rates for hail insurance. But, he argued, the prevention of hail would lower the insurance rates, which are based on the frequency of such storms in any area and the amount of damage done.
To prevent hail, Gordon and his pilots flew into and over thunderstorms, to see if they contained hail in dangerous sizes and, if so, they dropped his secret chemicals into the tops of the clouds. This is called “seeding” by the rainmakers. Gordon was sure that he was preventing hail damage from the clouds they seeded. By 1952 he had nine planes at his command. In that year, from June 1 to October 1, they checked 421 thunderstorms and found ice in dangerous sizes in eighty-two of them, which were seeded. He reported to the farmers that there was no appreciable hail damage from any of them and there were no complaints on that score.
During this time he was watching the reports of tornadoes and getting the Weather Bureau’s forecasts and warnings. On May 26, he heard a prediction of tornadoes in an area which included the two counties where he was working to prevent hail. Without regard for the danger of flying among thunderheads in tornado weather, his planes were in the air for a total of nearly ten hours that day, seeding clouds that looked dangerous. That night, a half hour after the last of Gordon’s planes landed, the Weather Bureau issued an “all clear.” There had been no tornadoes in either county. Gordon said, “We can’t prove that we prevented a tornado—maybe none would have formed anyway—but we do know that conditions were right for one, and we changed those conditions.”
For a man of Clouser’s adventurous spirit, this was just a side issue. He occupied much of his spare time studying hurricanes and making plans for the day when he would be operating a large company to kill these storms before they reached the Coasts of the United States. He hoped to have his main office in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with planes stationed also at Pensacola, Florida, on the coast of Mexico, in Cuba, and at two or three other strategic places. He would get the government reports, talk to the weather men, and at the right time drop a mixture containing his secret formula into the eye of the storm or some other vital spot that he would find by flying above the storm clouds and studying the wind circulation.
His wife, Olive, took this philosophically. With their three children, she was living at Norman, near Oklahoma City. Like the wives of most adventurous pilots, she knew that any one of these trips might be her husband’s last. She encouraged him in his hail prevention but worried about tornadoes, and especially hurricanes. She knew that they form and move over vast sea surfaces on which the winds impress violent motions, a deadly place for a man to land when in trouble. After Gordon flew into the tornado clouds in May, he came to Oklahoma City by bus and called her on the phone to come and get him in the car. Instead of going home, he asked her to drive him to the Weather Bureau Office at the airport, where he checked on the reports to see if they knew what had happened to the tornadoes. Then she found out what he had been doing and heard him talking about hurricanes.
Olive had something special on her mind. She wanted to paint the kitchen-yellow, but he was against it. She tried to get a compromise. If he was going to fly into tornadoes and other storms against her advice, why not paint the kitchen yellow, even if he didn’t like it very much? He offered strong objections and she put it off for a while.
In the meantime, Gordon was in trouble. September of that year—1952—was very dry in Texas. The farmers in Floyd and Hale Counties in that state got the idea that his agitations against hail had prevented rain. Anyway, he was out of work, for, as he said, “There is no point in a hail-busting business when there are no clouds.” A delegation of farmers called on him to protest his activities. They said that he and his men had deprived them of rain and they were going to lose a lot of money.
Gordon convinced them that his work on the clouds earlier in the year had nothing to do with the drought. He pointed out that only 82 out of 421 storms had been seeded; therefore, 339 of them had acted exactly as nature had intended. Besides that, he showed them news reports that nearly all of Texas was dry, some parts being much drier than the counties he was working. They went home satisfied, but Gordon had time on his hands, with no thunderheads or clouds to work on. So he gathered data on hurricanes and spent a good deal of time at home, making experiments in the freezer. He wanted to work on big storms. The little ones in Floyd and Hale Counties gave him trouble. All rainmakers know that it is possible to seed a cloud and have rain on the farm or ranch of a man who refuses to pay for seeding, and have no rain on a farm next to it, owned by a man who has paid for the service.