Charles Mallory Hatfield

A starchy Quaker sewing machine salesman who billed himself as a "Moisture Accelerator" owns a unique place in Southern California history, somewhere between meteorology and jurisprudence. Before the Los Angeles and Colorado River aqueducts brought reliable water supplies to the Southland, there was the rainmaker: Charles Mallory Hatfield.

A starchy Quaker sewing machine salesman who billed himself as a "Moisture Accelerator" owns a unique place in Southern California history, somewhere between meteorology and jurisprudence. Before the Los Angeles and Colorado River aqueducts brought reliable water supplies to the Southland, there was the rainmaker: Charles Mallory Hatfield.

The Southland was hit by the first in a wave of storms that dumped 11.4 inches of rain. The resulting floods killed 20 people and sparked a flurry of lawsuits, many of them aimed at rainmaker Charles Mallory Hatfield, who billed himself as a "Moisture Accelerator." The city of San Diego had hired Hatfield to coax precipitation from the clouds. His career inspired a Broadway play that became the 1956 film "The Rainmaker," starring Burt Lancaster.

Edmond Jeffery arrived in Malibou Lake with 25 feet of scaffolding and a secret atomic process for making rain. Two years of drought had kept the lake bone-dry. The people of this small town in the Santa Monica Mountains were tired of staring at dust, at boat docks standing naked as skeletons. Nature had robbed them of their watery jewel.They paid Jeffery $250, plus room and board, to make things right. The bearded ex-pilot proclaimed: "It'll rain in seven days." That was 1961.