Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Bill O'Toole, near his home in Emmitsburg, Md. A retired math professor, he has served for more than 40 years as the prognosticator of a 217-year-old almanac.
In these times of upset and uncertainty, comfort comes in knowing that dental floss can cut a dense cheesecake more cleanly than any knife. That cloves of garlic will send ants scurrying. That a cow requires at least 15 pounds of hay per day. That the state bird of South Dakota is the ring-necked pheasant.
For the 217th consecutive year, useful facts and tips like these have been assembled in J. Gruber's Hagerstown Town and Country Almanack, a deceptively slim volume that is available to farmers, merchants and all good citizens — especially those residing in the Middle Atlantic States — at the nominal cost of $4.99.
Contained within its 82 pages is the accumulated wisdom of many generations of farmers who lived and worked according to the arc of the sun and the pull of the moon. This means that in addition to reporting that our nation's fifth vice president was Elbridge Gerry and that the gift of a daffodil represents unrequited love, Gruber's Almanack also provides "conjecture of the weather and other astronomical information."
For example, if you want to know what weather to expect in New England next Thanksgiving Day, the almanac offers an answer with a better-than-even shot at accuracy: "Snow, heavy south."
This is the educated guess of Bill O'Toole, 70, a retired college math professor who, for more than four decades, has served as the almanac's seventh prognosticator — or conjecturer, or calculator — a line of work that began in 1797 with a star-savvy blacksmith. Mr. O'Toole is tall and bearded, with large eyes that convey wonder in all things, and a business card that declares in black and white his gray-area profession.
Working from desk space carved out of the book clutter of a brick row house here in Emmitsburg, about a mile south of the Pennsylvania line, Mr. O'Toole endeavors to divine the weather as much as 18 months in advance. He does so with a conjurer's brew of age-old wisdom and 21st-century technology that includes a range of tools, from a software program of astronomical data produced by the United States Naval Observatory to the meticulous tracking — through some 30 computer programs he has written — of all things lunar.
The moon matters, Mr. O'Toole says, as people who work the land discovered long ago. "They noticed a trend," he says. "When the moon changed phase close to midnight, the weather over the next lunar week, between six and nine days, would be fair, agreeable, calm. But it was just the opposite if it occurred close to noon: snowy, rainy, stormy, disagreeable."
After completing his calculations, Mr. O'Toole charts his predictions on postcard-size weather maps of the continental United States, drawing a map for every week. Here, then, a test: Did the prognosticator foretell Sandy, the fall's calamitous superstorm?
He points to a blue-ink swirl that he drew on one of those small maps. In June 2011. "Tropical storm from Atlantic," the Almanack predicted — somewhat prematurely, it turned out. "I was off by a week and a few days," he says. "Not too bad, considering this was done 16 months earlier."
Mr. O'Toole ignores the occasional charge of quackery. He says that a person could predict the weather 25 percent of the time by simply throwing darts at a board, but that he shoots for better than 50 percent. And, in the annual "Conjecturer's Column" that he writes for the almanac, he is nothing if not candid about his performance.
"Daily forecasts for the mid-Atlantic region were correct 55.1 percent of the time, slightly below last year's 59.3 percent, which was the best in recent years," Mr. O'Toole wrote in the current almanac. "The worst month for daily forecasts was October at 38.7 percent; the best was May, clocking in at 72.6 percent."
Mr. O'Toole grew up in nearby Waynesboro, Pa. His father, William, was a toolmaker and sales representative, his mother, Dora, a homemaker and parish secretary who had grown up on a dairy farm. After she died at 91 last year, Mr. O'Toole found a diary in which his mother had faithfully recorded the weather every day for nearly 70 years.
High 76 degrees; rain; bright moonlit night...
"A deeply ingrained tradition among farmers," he explained. A small way of trying to make sense of the natural world by those so grounded in it.
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