ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED | MAY 1955 | BETTER FARMING
This cartoon, featured in the May 1955 issue of Better Farming magazine, parodies modern weather forecasts as unpredictable and unreliable by depicting them being chosen at random like a lottery. While the daily weather forecast has often been the butt of jokes from its introduction in the 1860s, the Spring of 1955 was an especially turbulent time for weather in continental North America. An unusually warm month of March was capped off by a phenomenally cold final week that saw large snowfalls and record-breaking minimum temperatures that reached as cold as -30°C in some parts of southern Canada and the northern states. The cold weather continued into April, with snowfall being particularly bad out west. In fact, Edmonton received a record-shattering 38 cm of snow in a single day on April 19.