Saturday, September 30, 2000
Rotan rain watcher keeps track
of good and bad times since ’85
 By Ken
Ellsworth
Reporter-News Staff Writer
ROTAN — Horace Carter watches for,
prays for and patiently waits for rain. When it does rain, he
carefully writes the precise amount of precipitation down on the
lines of a well-handled notebook as he has faithfully done since
1985.
“I’ve always wondered about the
rain and I found you get more rain when you start marking it down,”
Carter, 74, said earlier this week.
He said that with a drought-dry, straight
face, but there was a telltale twinkle in his eye.
But Carter, a retired Fisher County cotton
farmer, takes his rain seriously. He has obtained Fisher County
rain records from the weather bureau dating back to 1927. He mixes
those records with his own.
Without looking at the records, he can precisely
recall the good and the bad years. He remembers not so much from
his rain records as from his cotton yields.
The drought of 1951-54 was the worst.
“Those were the years that people had
to take second jobs,” said his wife, Betty. The couple married
in 1947.
During those hard times, Carter went to
work at, City Bakery, which Betty’s father owned and operated
in downtown Rotan. Horace Carter made doughnuts. Betty baked.
It helped them squeak through the near-cottonless years and raise
a son and daughter.
Carter, a former Fisher County Farm Bureau
president, graduated from Rotan High School in 1944. He was an
all-district, 6-foot, 175-pound center. After a year or so in
the U.S. Army, he was offered football scholarships by Texas Christian
and Southern Methodist universities, but turned them down, losing
a chance to block for All-American Doak Walker at SMU.
“I was too smart for them. Instead,
I married Betty,” Carter said, again expressionless and dry
as Fisher County’s dirt, except for the twinkle in his eye.
Betty, a Rotan High School Class of ‘45
graduate, was a student at McMurry College at the time.
Every day at 5 a.m., Carter wakes and drives
past scorched cotton fields on the way to the land he used to
farm, but now leases. Often before the sun rises, he walks around
his farm pond several times. He limps slightly, pushing a walking
aid into the soft, sandy dirt, and counts his steps — once
around is 300.
If there’s any sign of rain, Carter
drives another quarter-mile to his professional rain gauge. It
can measure as little as 1/100th of an inch. It’s a small
tube in a big tube. Carter notes the precipitation measurement
and writes it down, even such small amounts as “half-a-trace.”
There was a time when he noted down the
results collected from three rain gauges. Now he’s down to
one. If it’s rainy, though, his excitement level increases
and he might drive out to the gauge three or more times in a day
so that not a drop will escape his notebook.
Rain is too important to just write it down,
though. You need to pray for it too, Carter said.
He and Betty have attended rain prayer meetings
on Thursday nights for nearly two straight years. They have missed
only three during that time, because the meetings seem so urgent.
The meetings are rotated among participating
Fisher County churches. When the meetings are at the Church of
Christ, people sing the hymns a cappella. At the other Protestant
churches, everybody, even the Church of Christ folks, sings right
along with the piano.
“It’s brought us together. We
cooperate with each other more than we did,” Betty Carter
said.
Horace Carter said the services apparently
have succeeded in bringing more rain. He peered into his rain
notebook to prove it.
“Look. Before we got started with the
prayer meetings, we just got 9 inches that year. But we’ve
already got 16 this year,” he said.
So when it rains, Horace Clark writes it
down. But rain or shine, both husband and wife go to church and
pray.
“God tells us to keep on keepin’
on, so that’s what we do,” Betty said.
Contact regional writer Ken
Ellsworth at 676-6777 or ellsworthk@abinews.com.
Check out our Web site at www.reporternews.com
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Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps Publications
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