A Weather Watcher for 85 Years
In Richard G. Hendrickson’s monthly weather reports, summarized from the daily data he diligently collected in Bridgehampton for nearly 85 years, one could find not only a record of temperatures, precipitation, and wind directions, but anecdotes and wisdom from bygone days on the South Fork. He brought to them a farmer’s appreciation of the joys and challenges that came with each month of the year and an environmentalist’s concern for the future of the South Fork in the face of overdevelopment and global warming.
Mr. Hendrickson, a volunteer with the National Weather Service’s Cooperative Observer Program since he was a teenager, continued to take measurements and readings at his backyard weather station on Lumber Lane until early last year, when he was 102.
He was the country’s longest-serving volunteer observer and was honored numerous times for his longevity of service and the volume of historical weather information he contributed to his country by chronicling the area’s weather twice a day, almost every day since 1930. An award for 80 years of service was named in his honor, and last year he was recognized for 85 years of service.
“He was such a hero,” said Tim Morrin, who manages the Cooperative Observer Program. “He was so unselfish; he would go over and beyond.”
“He represented the true art of taking weather observations,” said I. Ross Dickman, the meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service’s office in Upton, who praised his “dedication and loyalty” over the years. “He would call in with not only his weather observations, but he would tell us a story.”
When the observer program was modernized, volunteers were given the chance to report their observations electronically. “He really didn’t want to have any part of that because to him, the most important part of his daily observation was actually talking to one of the members of the National Weather Service,” Mr. Morrin said. “It was a special thing for all of us.”
Mr. Hendrickson died on Saturday at the Westhampton Care Center at the age of 103.
A farmer by profession like his father before him, he was also a historian, author, and collector extraordinaire whose basement was a veritable museum of interesting items and artifacts from the South Fork and beyond, each of which had a story that he knew and loved to share.
He collected arrowheads, spear points, and Native American tools, hand-carved decoys, and antique firearms and cannons, among other things. An expert on firearms, he had given more than 100 lectures on the subject and had a firearms business on the side, buying and selling new and used hunting guns and pistols as well as ammunition, cannons, powder horns, and swords. His collection of antique guns included one that dated to the 1400s and another that had belonged to the famous lawman Wyatt Earp.
He fired the working cannons in his front yard on Independence Day and New Year’s Eve for 60 years and took them to such events as the Bridgehampton Museum’s annual antique road rally, where they added a bang to the starting line festivities.
“They just don’t make people like Richard Hendrickson anymore,” said Bob DeLuca, president of the Group for the East End, which had an office in Bridgehampton for many years. “He had a passion for life and the world around him and an unending curiosity that fueled his consistent learning and his desire to educate others.” Each month Mr. Hendrickson would take his handwritten weather summaries to the group’s offices, where staff members would type them up before he sent them on to local newspapers. In the process, Mr. Hendrickson would regale them with stories and interesting tidbits.
“He was a rare treasure,” said Julie Greene, curator and archivist for the Bridgehampton Museum. Mr. Hendrickson had long served as the museum’s historian and was a founding member of the Bridge Hampton Historical Society, as the museum was formerly known. “Whenever I had a question, he would be the first person that would pop into my mind,” she said. “He told some of the most incredible stories of the area, and not just about the people but the land and where the world is coming from and how it’s changed.”
“He was interested in all things related to history,” said his granddaughter Sara Hendrickson of Bridgehampton.
On his mother’s side, Mr. Hendrickson’s ancestors had deep roots on the South Fork. His great-great-grandfather Capt. Jesse R. Halsey sailed on a whaling boat out of Sag Harbor. His father, Howard Hendrickson, was born on a farm and came to work in 1907 at a Bridgehampton potato farm, where his father eventually bought him the Hill View Farm on Lumber Lane. After trying potatoes he turned to dairy farming and later the poultry business.
Richard G. Hendrickson was born at Hill View Farm on Sept. 2, 1912, to Howard Hendrickson and the former Edith Rogers. Finding arrowheads and spear points while clearing farmland with his father as a boy sparked a lifelong interest in the South Fork’s original inhabitants.
He lived and worked on Hill View Farm or nearby for his entire life, with a brief exception. In 1917 and ’18, to avoid the flu epidemic, he and his brother, Erwin, were sent to live with his mother’s parents on Gardiner’s Island, where his grandfather rented land to raise sheep, hogs, and cattle and grow corn and hay.
He left high school to help out on the farm. When he was 18, Ernest S. Clowes, an author who had operated a backyard weather station for the National Weather Service, convinced Mr. Hendrickson’s father to set up a station at Hill View Farm and taught the teenager to take the measurements.
“We had 30 head of milk cows, 5,500 white leghorn breeders [chickens], were hatching 2,500 baby chicks weekly, and shipping hatching eggs to nearby states and overseas,” Mr. Hendrickson wrote in his 1996 book, “Winds of the Fish’s Tail.” “We also raised 4,500 pullets each year, raised all our new calves, acres of corn, alfalfa, and wheat, plus we experimented with types of new and improved pastures by importing different grasses and clovers from around the world. All this was reason enough to want to study and work with nature.”
At that point he was already running the poultry operation on the farm. Working at first with Mr. Clowes and later on his own, he took weather readings at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. almost every day from then on, providing data daily to the National Weather Service and later summarizing his observations for a monthly weather column sent to local papers.
In 1935 he married Dorothea Haelig, a teacher from New Jersey who had come to work at the Bridgehampton School. She was 10 years his senior, said his granddaughter. They had a son, Richard H. Hendrickson.
The family left dairy farming in 1953, when Suffolk County passed a law requiring that milk be pasteurized. “We couldn’t afford to pasteurize, so we gave up the herd and imported 50 head of beef cattle weighing 400 to 500 pounds, and kept them till they weighed over 1,000 pounds, and sold them at livestock auctions in Pennsylvania,” he told The Star in 1993. Failing to make money on the steers, Hill View Farm instead expanded the poultry operation through the 1970s and ’80s, then turned to field corn and sweet corn.
Mr. Hendrickson retired from farming in the early 1980s and rented space in the chicken houses for car storage.
He was a man of his place and rarely left town, but in 1959 he and his wife made an unlikely journey to New Zealand, where they dined with the prime minister. The trip was “courtesy of the Hormel Meat Co. because they had purchased the one billionth can of Spam,” according to a 1997 article in Newsday.
His first wife died in early 1982. He was married later that year to Lillian Baldac, who died in June.
Mr. Hendrickson remained both engaged and active into his 90s and 100s, even chopping his own wood and mowing his own lawn in the last decade.
“He consistently had a boyish fascination, a whimsy about how wonderful every aspect of the natural world is. He had it to the last day I saw him. And there wasn’t a thing that went by that he wasn’t curious about,” Mr. DeLuca said.
He published his second book, “From the Bushy Plain of Bulls Head,” a memoir written almost entirely in verse, in 2006.
In addition to his granddaughter Sara Hendrickson, he leaves two other granddaughters, Leah Hendrickson and Rachel Green, both of Jamesport, a sister, Edith Williams of Raleigh, N.C., and several nieces and nephews. His brother died before him, and his son died in 2014.
Services for Mr. Hendrickson are to begin on Friday, Jan. 22, with visiting from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. at the Brockett Funeral Home in Southampton. A funeral will be held at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church on Jan. 23 at 11 a.m., followed by burial at Edgewood Cemetery in Bridgehampton.
Donations have been suggested to the Bridgehampton Museum, P.O. Box 977, Bridgehampton 11932.