"MOON MAN" DIES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 69, 22 March 1934, Page 26

"MOON MAN" DIES.

FORECASTED PRICES. PICTURESQUE LIFE. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SAN FRANCISCO, February 23. Ono of America's most picturesque characters lias just passed away in the 2>erson of Virgil Moore, aged CD, und nationally known as "Moon Man."

Pneumonia brought to an end his career as an Alaskan adventurer, world traveller, editor, and eventually grain market forecaster, ■ who utilised the position of the moon and the planets as a part basis for liis long-distancc pricc predictions.

His wife, Mrs. Allie Hazard Moore, who was with him when ho died in a Kansas City hospital, is an astrologer, and told of his life as she dug through piles of scrap-books. "Here is the iirst magazine published in tho Klondike, by Virgil Moore," slio said. "He w ro tc every word of it himself."

1 In the Klondike in 1891, three years j before, tho gold rush, she said ho discovered the largest coal mine ill the world, in Alaska. He jiublished the first newspaper in Nome, Alaska; he sold that colourful adventurer, Tex Rickard, tho site: for his first saloon in Nome, and lio and Tex were partners iu the hotel and opera house business there for three years; and he wrote poems about tho Klondike snowslides, she added.

"Did you know he published a daily newspaper in California when lie was 10, and that two years before he made a trip around the world?"

When a boy at tho transbay San Francisco city of Oakland, he and a friend went • through a huge sewer, she said. The current was swift, the whirlpools dangerous, and the boys' boat was tossed about.

"Whom should tlicy see, waiting to help them out of danger but Jack London, wearing a red handkerchief around his neck."

The hero of London's book, "The Sea Wolf," was an uncle of Moore's, she said, named Whiting.

After his marriage in 1918, Moore set up his novel forecasting service in the great wheat centre of Kansas City. Saturn and Mars were the "bearish" planets, Jupiter and Venus the "bullish" ones. He made several successful forecasts, so that the attention of grain traders was attracted, to his service.

"Well, moon man," traders would ask, "What's the market going to do now?" His reply was: "On such and such a date wheat will go up 3 cents."

Three surviving daughters by a previous, marriage air reside in California, and his sister, Mrs. Tlieodocia Durand, is the well-known artist of Santa Rosa, California.