Louis Rubin's weather forecasts ruled Richmond's calendars


Even before Double Doppler was a twinkle in John Bernier's eye, Louis Decimus Rubin, a retired appliances salesman and contractor, gave weather predictions.

From the 1950s until his death in 1970, Rubin issued his Rubin Day forecasts, days when local weather was supposed to turned cool or stormy as a result of volcanic ash whirling in the atmosphere. Many Richmonders cut out the information boxes from the Richmond newspapers for reference.

He believed that volcananic eruptions are the earth's reaction to sunspots, cooler, dark spots with geomagnetic properties on the surface of the sun. The sun's energy irritates the earth's interior until volcanoes blast, Rubin said, which professional meteorologists disputed. Ash, spewed into the upper atmosphere, follows the rotation of the earth in a predictable, westward direction and filters the sun's rays, thus reducing ground-level heat.

Monitoring volcanic activity from around the globe, Rubin predicted cool temperatures and storms--but not hot weather. He also forecast earthquakes using data from sunspot activity. His daughter, Joan Schoenes, says he correctly checked off some major shakes. "He got the Nome, Alaska, one," she says of the Great Alaska Earthquake of March 1964, which at 9.2 magnitude stands as the largest temblor recorded in North America. In 1960, he also foresaw the world's most powerful quake, 9.5 magnitude in Chile.

Schoenes says that her father wanted to bequeath his earthquake-prediction equations to future generations. "He said he'd leave everything in a safe deposit box with my name on it," she explains. "But after he died, I went to the safe deposit box and opened it and it was empty."

Rubin grew up in Charleston, S.C., and dropped out of school after his parents' health failed. He married a Richmond girl and worked in his Charleston electronics business until brain abscesses immobilized him. The family moved here so Rubin could be treated. He underwent seven operations during a two-year period in the 1930s.

Louis Rubin Jr., who founded Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, N.C., recalls that his father's interest in meteorological events incubated while he convalesced at Memorial Hospital on East Broad Street. "My father had little to do but look out the windows and watch cloud patterns," Rubin wrote by e-mail. "His interest in weather predicting goes back before then, for there are photos of him in his office in Charleston in the 1920s ...with his recording barometer prominently displayed."

One of Rubin's hobbies -- an obsession, even -- was taking notes and photographs of cloud formations. He became expert in how their movement and size indicated daily weather patterns. His color photographs were used in three encyclopedias and seven science textbooks. They also illustrated his posthumous 1970 Forecasting The Weather book, revised with the assistance of Channel 12 meteorologist Jim Duncan for a 1984 reprint as the Weather Wizard's Cloud Book. It remains in print today.

Rubin was making his weather forecasts public for five years when he rated a profile in the March 22, 1956, Richmond News Leader headlined "Wythe Ave. ‘Wizard' Worries Weathermen." Rubin claimed 80 percent accuracy. "Others," according to a 1991 Times-Dispatch retrospective, "calculated his success rate at 39 percent on the average and as low as 11 percent."

But Rubin thought he was predicting the weather and if Richmonders didn't believe it, they at least used his forecasts, with a grain of salt, as a hedge against the future.

The calculus for forecasting storms and cold weather came into hands of Schoenes. Did the Rubin family themselves adhere to the warnings of a Rubin Day? "No," she chuckles. "We didn't plan around them. We kept them in mind, you always hoped. We' d dash for the calendar to check. If the Rubin Day proved correct, then it was score one for Dad."