Fine Days By “ Magic. ”

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19240, 29 November 1930, Page 17 (Supplement)

Fine Days By “ Magic. ”

Wizard Earns £ISOO A Week. NEW YORK, September 30. The magic of Zoroaster, founder of the ancient Persian religion, is being invoked to prevent rain from stopping the races at Belmont Park, New York’s fashionable track. A minister of Zoroastrianism, who bears the resounding name of George Ambrosius Immanuel Morrison Sykes, is being paid £SOO on Saturdays and £2OO on the other weekdays by the Westchester Racing Association to keep the sky blue, but he forfeits £4OO daily if it rains. So far the luck of the weather has been all with Sykes, and Joseph E. Widener, the famous sportsman and art collector, who is chairman of the association, has been so impressed by his success that he is collecting evidence of weather control to transmit to his friend, Lord Derby. Racing stewards here feel they would like to share their magician with their English cousins, who have considerably greater need of him. Supporters of Sykes are urging him to go to London, where, they declare, the climate would afford him even fuller scope for his talents. “Blowing away London's gloom would be nothing to a man of his powers,” one of them said to-day. The rain dispeller attributes his success to six years spent in plumbing the mysteries of astral physics among the sages of India, but sceptics assert that statistics suggest it is fairly safe to gamble on a dry September here. Sykes’s apparatus is a Heath Robinsonish device of electric heaters, old wireless sets and a network of wires. His great triumph came last week when he beat the United States Weather Bureau which had promised, light showers. Clouds hovered ominously over the race track and thert this lean, mild-mannered old man, who has the pointed beard of the fairy tale magician, buried his head in his cluster of wires and three hours later the sky was a clear blue. “How is that for a miracle?" he asked. “In seven and a quarter minutes I had a rift in the clouds right over me, while in less than 20 minutes they were drifting away, entirely discouraged.” Sykes has been yearning to conjure some rain for days past, but Widener urged him to desist for fear of spoiling

the polo, yacht racing and other international sporting events. The magician, however, says that in order to keep his hand in he must be allowed to produce a slight drizzle late to-day after the racing is finished. “Of course, I may be out of practice and bring it down harder than I intend," he conceded. Incidentally the Weather Bureau also forecasts showers for to-day.