The Old Farmer's Almanac -- Agrarian Chic In A High-Tech Age

IT WAS A CLEAR AND MOONLIT NIGHT, claimed the witness, and shortly before midnight he saw the defendant load a rock into his slingshot, take aim, and strike his victim right above the eye, killing him.

An excited buzz went up from the courtroom at this testimony; now it was up to the accused man's lawyer, a tall, gangly man dressed all in black, as lawyers often did in the mid-1800s, to refute this testimony. A look of puzzlement settled over the gaunt attorney's face as he approached the jury box, holding up a book with which they were all familiar.

The witness for the prosecution, he reminded the jury, had just sworn under oath that he could see everything in detail that night, since the moon was overhead, illuminating the fields below. Yet according to the book he held in his hand, explained the lawyer, that couldn't have happened; the woods would have been pitch black all night, as the moon was in its first quarter, and had set shortly before midnight, more precisely, at 11:57 p.m.

You can just picture the ensuing scene: the courtroom in uproar, the witness suddenly pale, hoist on his own lie.

There was no point disputing the evidence; the publication the lawyer was holding up was "The Old Farmer's Almanac."

EVERYONE IN THAT RURAL courtroom of 1858 knew the almanac; even then, it was the oldest publication in the country, having survived countless other almanacs, newspapers, magazines and fliers that had come and gone over the preceding century. In agrarian America, it was a sectarian Bible; there seemed no end to the needs it served.

Farmers consulted it for tips on harvesting and planting. Sailors read it to determine the rise and fall of tides. Housewives pored over beauty tips and recipes.

Physicians carried it with them, to know the most efficacious times of month for leeching afflicted patients.

In a time predating sitcoms, talk shows, or docudramas, the Old Farmer's Almanac provided insight, wisdom and entertainment for the entire family. But if one had stood on the sidewalks of any town in America and asked passers-by why they read the almanac, the most frequent answer given would have been, "Why, to know the weather, of course."

Thus, based on the data provided in the periodical's 1857 edition, the defendant Duff Armstrong was acquitted and went on to live out his life among his peers along the banks of the Sangamon River, in Illinois. The lawyer, an unprepossessing man named Abraham Lincoln, vaulted to new renown on the strength of his victory in court, and went on to become president of the United States. And the Old Farmer's Almanac? It just went on and on and on.

This year, it marks its 200th anniversary; it's still the oldest, and one of the most successful, publications in this country's history, with 1992 sales of 7 million copies, or almost five times the circulation of Life (1.5 million), and twice that of Playboy (3.4 million).

Today, as it has for two centuries, it dispenses humor, aphorisms, rhyme, while pulling no punches. Readers turn to it for guidance, for reassurance, for entertainment, and to know whether to wear their galoshes to the office.

As to why the almanac has survived 41 U.S. presidents, eight wars, and 10 score orbits of the earth around the sun, editor Jud Hale answers, "It may be continuity; we've had only 12 editors in 200 years. It may be the accuracy of our weather prognostications. Or it may be the association with famous events like Lincoln's defense of Armstrong. But the truth is, I really don't know why.

"I believe we're a link to something," he continues. "The almanac has always done well in times of recession. I think people hearken back to the traditional values in times of a crunch." A normally waggish sort, Hale turns grumpy at the slightest suggestion that the periodical's appeal is rooted in nostalgia or trivia. "The Old Farmer's Almanac isn't `quaint,' " he insists. "It's all about what's happening in our world, now. It's as up-to-date today as it was 200 years ago."

Still, there is something almost mythic about the very name, "Old Farmer's Almanac." It resonates the kind of integrity of which one might say money can't buy. Only today, it can. There's nothing quaint about the clout the Old Farmer's Almanac possesses.

As the Old Farmer's Almanac enters its third century, growing numbers of products, from rakes to pancake flour, are appearing on the market bearing the periodical's imprimatur. And in an electronic age, when the overwhelming majority of Americans are more familiar with boardrooms than barnyards, when the weather reports are broadcast two or three times an hour, when old-fashioned virtues are conceded to be going the way of buckboards, the Old Farmer's Almanac's grip on the imagination of Americans seems to grow stronger with each passing year.

GEORGE WASHINGTON WAS PRESIDENT and Philadelphia the national capital when, in 1792, Robert Bailey Thomas brought his handwritten draft of a new almanac to Apollo Press in Boston. Thomas was a 26-year-old schoolteacher and astronomer who lived his entire life near his birthplace in Boylston, Mass.

There were 19 other almanacs on sale in the bookstores of Boston, but Thomas had developed a secret formula for divining the weather based on the movements of the stars, the planets, and cycles of sunspots.

His almanac contained more than advice on the weather; the first edition also included such useful information as the names of towns and the names of innkeepers along the roads from Boston to nearby major towns, as well as Dartmouth College; schedules for federal-court sessions for the eastern circuit; advice on removing freckles; as well as a brief history of the persecution of the Jews - the first Jewish history printed in this country; mathematical puzzles, poetry, and witticisms.

Thomas must have hit the weather right on the button, because his almanac was an immediate success, with first-year sales of 3,000 for the 1793 edition, tripling to 9,000 the next year. Ten years after the appearance of his first issue, Thomas wrote that sales of his almanac exceeded those of any other in the United States, thanks to the accuracy of his weather predictions.

Thus, it was with horror that, in 1815, Thomas received his almanac back from the printer, and noted that it forecast a snowstorm in New England for the coming July and August. This daring prediction - it had never snowed in the summer in New England for all that region's recorded history - wasn't due to his astronomical insights, but due to a printer's typographical error. Thomas was panic-stricken; his almanac's credibility was at stake, and what was an almanac without credibility?

He tried to recall all the copies, and burned those he could reclaim and published a second printing, but the word got out anyway that the almanac predicted "snow in summer." He spent much of the first half of that year disclaiming that prediction.

Then, when much to the surprise of everyone - except those who had read and trusted the uncorrected edition of the Farmer's Almanac - it really did snow in July and August, Thomas had a change of heart, and announced that he had meant it all along, thus establishing the precedent of "almanacsmanship": the ex post facto manipulation of either the weather or predictions, to match the other.

WORD OF THE INCREDIBLE prophecy spread throughout the country, fueling the legend of the almanac's almost supernatural prowess at foretelling weather.

But times were changing, and by the almanac's 50th anniversary Thomas foresaw the end of America's agrarian age, and seemed to wonder how much longer his almanac could survive the onslaught of modernity. " ... 50 years ago, the worthy fathers and mothers of the present generation were willing to dress in their own homespun. Now the waterfall and steam engine, the improved spindles and other machines, manufacture millions of yards. ...

"Though we may not reach the 100th number of the Old Farmer's Almanac, yet we shall endeavor to improve as we progress. And hope our patrons will not be disposed to cut our acquaintance, as a modern Dandy would a rusty cousin from the backwoods. Because we look, as we pride ourselves in looking, a bit old-fashioned, a little too independent to hang our dress for each new-fangled notion, a little t'other side of 50."

And as long as Robert B. Thomas was editor there would be few newfangled notions to be found in the almanac, which, along with its weather forecasts, witticisms and anecdotes, preached a creed of sobriety, hard work and self-reliance: "Cut your clover, and mind your own business" (1801). "It is every man's duty to make himself profitable to mankind; if he can, to many; if not, to fewer; if not so neither, to his neighbors; but always, however, to himself" (1807). "He that gets drunk is first a mad man, then an idiot. Visit not the dram shop" (1846).

Two years after the 1846 death of the founder, the "Old" was added to the title, and a cover was devised with the likeness of the founder on one side and Benjamin Franklin for no reason other than Franklin seemed to be appropriate on the other, encircled by a design evoking the four seasons.

Otherwise, as the almanac passed into the hands of its second editor, along with the secret of its weather forecasting - the publication had not changed a whit.

A century and a half later, it still hasn't. "We haven't tried to yuppify ourselves," says managing editor Sussan Perry, a slender woman in her early 40s, as she moves through a garden of scrubby flora. "Maybe if 8,000 readers wrote and asked us to start writing about what white wine goes well with what entree, we'd think about it. But probably wouldn't do it.

"But I sometimes think the Seventies, the Me Decade, and the Eighties, the Greed Decade, simply missed our readers. At least, it hasn't changed us; the almanac's editorial philosophy is the same as it was in 1793: `To be useful, but with pleasure.' "

THE ALMANAC IS HOUSED in a rambling, red barn-like structure across the road from the volunteer fire station in Dublin, N.H., pop. 1,200, a town that looks like it should have a model railroad running around it. It's just the way Perry had always envisioned New Hampshire.

"We're not all New Englanders," explains the journalist, who grew up in Wisconsin and graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1970. "But the almanac does attract a certain type person. I don't know if I'm a tree hugger, but I am a gardener." Her contributions to the 200th-anniversary edition include advice on how to grow a 1792 garden. "We figured, if we're going to tell readers how to do it, we may as well plant one ourselves." Thus the spiky patch of daisies, dandelions, and other wildflowers that stands behind the almanac's office. "We're all drawn to the almanac by a common purpose; I love the small town virtues it stands for. I make bread. I love to sew. I'm on the library board. ... "

While some of the staffers have come a long way to work here, the man who embodies the almanac's ethos is Jud Hale, known as Jud XII, for his place in succession to the post of editor.

Tall and tweedy, with thick white hair setting off his youthful manner, the 58-year-old Hale looks like a country doctor - or the editor of a small-town newspaper. He obviously relishes his role as curator of national esoterica and Americana. His office is festooned with knickknacks, charts, ancient photos, stuffed animals and posters.

He points to a set of shelves at one end of his office. "This is my museum," he says, as proudly as a 10-year-old displaying a secret decoder ring. "I normally charge a nickel to see it; everything here has been sent to me by the almanac's readers." The "museum" contains such memorabilia as a stuffed chicken, a chunk of concrete from the Berlin Wall, a postcard of a Turkish belly dancer, a menu from a McDonald's in Moscow, and an eagle claw once worn by Sitting Bull. "You can't work for the almanac without a sense of humor and respect for nature," he says, as he drops into a chair at his desk. "We celebrate the ordinary. It's the antithesis of People magazine."

A photo of a boat over his desk hints at disdain for "political correctness." The vessel is named the "Wah-Hoo-Wah," after the now-forbidden cheer once yelled at his alma mater, when students were known as the Dartmouth Indians. Hale admits that his academic career at Dartmouth, which he entered after graduating from the exclusive Choate School, was checkered; his boyish exuberance - "I threw up on the dean's wife," he confesses, looking not the least bit remorseful - led to expulsion. After a stint in the Army, he returned to Hanover, N.H., and graduated in 1958.

Hale had no idea what he was going to do after college. So his mother suggested he call up his uncle, Robb Sagedorph, the owner of Yankee Publications, and the almanac's editor. "I called him up and said, `Hi, Uncle Robb.' I made sure to call him uncle. `This is Jud, Martha's boy. Remember me?' He said, `Oh, uh, yes, John. Of course I remember you.' "

As luck would have it, Uncle Robb did have a job with the family publishing firm - unloading trucks. Eleven years later, upon his uncle's death, Hale became editor. The almanac's success since then, say the editor's co-workers, is due in great part to Hale's sense of what the almanac means to its readers. "Jud feels an obligation to our readers," says the almanac's publisher, John Pierce, like Hale a Dartmouth grad. "They feel very proprietary about it. They scan every inch of it, looking for errors, eternally vigilant against variations from formats of the past."

Pierce cites the example of the gentleman who wrote to say, "I have read the Farmer's Almanac for the last 75 years and I wish the damned fool that changed the reading of the moon's column had died before he done it. Yours, respectfully, ..."

As Hale sees it, his job is simple: "My mission isn't to change the almanac, just to improve it."

Fact is, for all the almanac's legendary integrity, it wasn't always so conscientiously written, the editor confides. "There were times during the Civil War when it looked like they were putting out the same edition every year. You could read the almanac from those years without ever suspecting there was any political disturbance going on."

Then in 1938, the almanac's third owner published an edition with no weather prognostications whatsoever.

"Circulation the next year plummeted," sighs Hale. The following year Robb Sagedorph acquired the periodical and set to rebuilding the almanac's reputation and relationship with its audience. "He was a great practitioner of `almanacsmanship,' " the editor says, admiringly. "He began describing winters as `mild,' or `an old-fashioned winter.' " The almanac's weather reports became a matter of national security in 1942 when a German spy, who had landed from a U-boat, was apprehended in Penn Station by the FBI. Within his overcoat he carried a copy of that year's Old Farmer's Almanac. Were the Germans using Sagedorph's allegedly infallible forecasts to plan an invasion?

The Office of Censorship finally decreed that the almanac could continue to publish the coming year's weather, as long as they were described as weather indications, and not forecasts.

Today, Robert Thomas' secret astronomical formula for divining the weather resides in a black tin box somewhere in the building. But, alas, it is no longer used, and the weather is no longer the exclusive purview of the editor. Instead, the job of deciding whether to carry an umbrella or sunglasses has been delegated to former NASA scientist and doctoral meteorologist Richard Head, who characterizes the ancient technique as "interesting" but too broad and simple to be applied across North America.

While sentimentalists may lament the passing of tradition, Hale points out the weather comprises only 26 of some 300 published pages. The rest of the periodical, he explains, follows the format established in 1792: "food, history, saving money, and the `whacko' stuff."

There's only one story the almanac has used more than once, he advises. "We've used it several times. It was about a group of old people in Montpelier, Vt., who would gather in a house waiting for the first snowfall. As the temperature dropped, they would go out and lie down in the snow until they froze, and were buried. Then in the spring, with the first thaw, their bodies would be brought back into the house, and the color would return to their faces as they thawed out, and came back to life.

"I found myself in Montpelier once and asked some of the locals if they had ever heard that story. `Yup,' they said.

"But I wanted to know if they believed it. Yup, they said, `All except that part about thawing out.' "

THIS YEAR'S STORY LINE-UP includes "Things We Wish We Didn't Know," a compendium of somewhat revolting facts, beginning with the revelation that there are hundreds of tiny little creatures called follicle mites living amidst our eyelashes; "What They Know About You," the results of obscure research projects; "How to Get Rich Without Doing Any Work," which includes John D. Rockefeller's advice, "Go to work early. Stay late. Strike oil"; recipes for the most popular desserts of the past two centuries; "How to Grow a 1,000-pound pumpkin"; an encyclopedia of herbs; a social history of lawns and lawn mowing; and answers from 15 celebrities to these questions: What would not change in the next 200 years? What should change the most? What is your personal method of forecasting the weather? What are America's great strengths and weaknesses? What parts of the almanac are their favorites? The dumbest?

Former president Jimmy Carter, Lee Iacocca and Phyllis Diller are among the respondents, and the graduate of Choate and Dartmouth slips into his "aw-shucks" mode for a moment; "I knew we couldn't afford to pay them, so I offered them each a pint can of my sister's maple syrup as payment."

Actually, Hale probably could have offered them several carloads of maple syrup without denting the almanac's treasury. Yankee Publishing Inc., the parent company, doesn't reveal profits, but in the midst of the publishing business's worst slump in memory, the Old Farmer's Almanac enjoyed net advertising revenues double that of the previous year.

In 1990 the periodical began courting advertising from mainstream advertisers, and now contains full-page, four-color ads for Sorel boots, Florida orange juice, Chevrolet trucks, Total cereal, and Agway stores amidst smaller black-and-white inserts for choir robes, miracle magnifying eyeglasses, hair thickener, copper bracelets, apple juicers, weathervanes, racks for holding multiple caps, bag balm for curing animal sores, toenail-fungus ointment, trusses, and insurance to help pay burial expenses. The almanac still refuses all ads for alcohol or tobacco.

Hale takes a sanguine view of the more bizarre products hawked in his pages. "Jimmy Carter was an advertiser, long before he became president; he used the almanac to sell worms for bait." Nowadays, he says, ads fall into one of three categories: "Advertisements in good taste, advertisements in questionable taste - like the miracle cures or anti-aging products - and advertisements in bad taste, like voodoo dolls, which some people could attempt to use for malicious purposes.

"Each year, after heated debate, we happily accept ads in the first two categories."

Soaring revenues from advertising aren't the only thing boosting the almanac's profits. There's also an Old Farmer's Almanac video, a syndicated newspaper column, and a 200th-anniversary hardcover book from Random House, "The Best of the Old Farmer's Almanac." In the past three years the almanac's publishers have licensed the use of the periodical's familiar cornstarch-yellow logo to the makers of over 75 products ranging from cocoa mix to fertilizer.

Still, editor Hale is wary of the consequences of getting too big. "I'll never forget Uncle Robb's words on the subject," he reminisces. "It was shortly before his death, in 1970. He'd called his son-in-law, Rob Trowbridge, and me to his bedside to tell us he wanted Rob to succeed him as publisher, and me to follow him as editor. Then, in a very faint voice, little more than a whisper, he added, `Don't grow any more, boys.' "

These words took the new publisher and the new editor aback, as both the almanac and Yankee magazine had experienced healthy growth, and the two young executives expected to maintain that rate of growth.

"Why not, Uncle Robb," asked Hale, expecting to hear words of cosmic wisdom. But Uncle Robb, with classic Yankee practicality, was thinking about their antiquated offices.

"Because the plumbing won't take it."

"In recent years," concludes Hale, with a faint smile, "I've come to regard those words as profound."

Jack Smith is a freelance writer living in Wayne, Penn.