cover image The Wizard of Sun City: The Strange True Story of Charles Hatfield, the Rainmaker Who Drowned a City's Dreams

The Wizard of Sun City: The Strange True Story of Charles Hatfield, the Rainmaker Who Drowned a City's Dreams

Garry Jenkins, .. Thunder's Mouth, $24 (266pp) ISBN 978-1-56025-675-5

Journalist Jenkins (Colonel Cody and the Flying Cathedral ) has carefully researched the career of Charles Hatfield (1875–1958), the man fictionalized in R. Richard Nash's play The Rainmaker, whom some still credit with precipitating the San Diego flood of 1916. Beginning on January 5 of that year, a series of torrential storms filled the Morena Reservoir and flooded the surrounding area; the Lower Otay Dam overflowed, washing out farms and causing dozens of deaths. Hatfield had long been experimenting with chemical combinations he believed could produce rain; he built a windmill tower and heated a secret formula (still under lock and key), launching vapors into the clouds. The controversial rainmaker was hired by San Diego officials during a 1915 drought to fill the city's reservoir. The rains came, but Hatfield was refused his $10,000 payment by the City Council. Since there were widespread storms all over southern California during this period, meteorologists doubt that Hatfield caused the storms. Although Jenkins successfully evokes a sense of time and place and recounts a wealth of detail about rainmaking, his portrait of the charming but highly private Hatfield lacks vitality. Photos. (July 1)