Gordon Clouser was born in 1912, in Gibraltar, Pennsylvania. He grew into his teens as an active, good-looking boy with many diverse interests. Quick to learn, he finished high school at fourteen. His family moved to New Mexico, where he worked several years as a surveyor, then took two degrees at the University of New Mexico. After that, he had many activities—teacher, librarian, writer and director of plays. He made a movie, composed music, wrote poetry, was in the Air Corps reserve one year, taught meteorology and aeronautics at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle for a year and a half. He learned to fly in Idaho and then was a teacher in Junior College in Yakima, Washington. It was 1950 when Gordon became excited about the work that was being done in rainmaking in many parts of the country. By April of the next year, he had moved to Plainview, Texas, and had begun to organize airplane operations to prevent hail on the high plains of the State. Having developed his own secret formula for the chemicals to be dropped into thunderstorm clouds, he experimented in his car, in airplanes and in the home freezer. Once he came home for dinner, carrying some denim to be used in connection with an experiment, and his wife discovered that he had taken all the food out of the freezer so he could drop chemicals in it, to see what might happen in the atmosphere. When he asked what they were having for dinner, she replied, “I guess it will be frozen denim.” The year 1951 was not an easy one for Clouser. The thought of preventing hail was new to most people and he had some difficulty in getting enough money to finance the necessary plane operations. He asked farmers for twenty to forty cents an acre for protection from hail and compared this cost with the much higher rates for hail insurance. But, he argued, the prevention of hail would lower the insurance rates, which are based on the frequency of such storms in any area and the amount of damage done. To prevent hail, Gordon and his pilots flew into and over thunderstorms, to see if they contained hail in dangerous sizes and, if so, they dropped his secret chemicals into the tops of the clouds. This is called “seeding” by the rainmakers. Gordon was sure that he was preventing hail damage from the clouds they seeded. By 1952 he had nine planes at his command. In that year, from June 1 to October 1, they checked 421 thunderstorms and found ice in dangerous sizes in eighty-two of them, which were seeded. He reported to the farmers that there was no appreciable hail damage from any of them and there were no complaints on that score.