WASHINGTON — Every day in the century that Richard G. Hendrickson spent on Hill View Farm, a poultry and dairy operation in the Long Island hamlet of Bridgehampton, N.Y., there were duties to be done.
There were eggs to collect — 4,500 a day when he was young. There were cows to milk. There was hay to cut. And there was the temperature, maybe even some rainfall, to measure, a task that he faithfully performed twice a day, morning and evening, during an unprecedented 85 years as a National Weather Service volunteer.
Officially, Mr. Hendrickson, who died Jan. 9 at 103, belonged to the Weather Service’s corps of Cooperative Observers, a network established in 1890 to help track meteorological data across the expanse of the United States. The group today includes more than 8,700 volunteers.
Mr. Hendrickson was the first observer in the program’s history to serve more than 80 years, a distinction that made him a celebrity among the country’s most devoted weather buffs. The Weather Service, an authority in the measurement of accumulation, estimated that Mr. Hendrickson had compiled more than 150,000 weather observations in his life.
He did not set out to be a weatherman, volunteer or otherwise. In his teens, a period that coincided with the Calvin Coolidge administration, he befriended a local writer and weather enthusiast who asked to install a weather observation station on the Hendrickson farm. The family agreed, Mr. Hendrickson became an apprentice, and by July 1, 1930, according to many accounts, he had taken over its operation.
The weather station, resembling a miniature white shed on stilts, contained thermometers to measure the high, low, and current temperatures. Mr. Hendrickson’s instruments also included a rain gauge and a wind gauge, installed on his roof, which he checked during storms as frequently as every quarter-hour.
Most modern-day Cooperative Observers submit their findings electronically; Mr. Hendrickson used a black rotary phone.
Mr. Hendrickson also regularly produced a written chart and report, submitted in carbon copy to the Weather Service, its predecessor, the US Weather Bureau, and several local newspapers, in which he spun his observations of the skies into poetic meditations on the joys and agonies of the farmer’s life.
‘‘Pastures burnt brown,’’ he wrote in an Aug. 26, 1948, installment excerpted by Newsday. ‘‘Poultry farms lost hundreds of birds from heat. All sweet corn, cucumber dried up. Feed corn drying fast.’’
Winter, too, brought its threats. ‘‘If ever you were to feed the wildlife,’’ he wrote in January 1965, ‘‘it is now. It is impossible for the birds and rabbits to dig through the settled, hardpacked and frozen 6 inches of crusty snow to get seeds and food.’’
On occasion, the sky offered some reward, such as in October 1974, as reprinted in Newsday:
‘‘At month’s end,’’ Mr. Hendrickson reported, ‘‘each night a most beautiful ‘Hunter’s Moon’ rose in splendor that has awed civilization since history began.’’
Mr. Hendrickson sought no remuneration for his data collection, not even during the Depression, when he said his family fell into debt for its chicken house and farmhouse. A farmer must be his own weatherman, he once told the Associated Press, because ‘‘you don’t cut hay today and let it dry in the field if you know it’s going to rain tomorrow.’’
Plus, ‘‘it’s what I do for my country,’’ Mr. Hendrickson told Newsday in 1997. ‘‘I don’t belong to the fire department. I’ve got to do something.’’
Only rarely in his 103 years did Mr. Hendrickson take a break from his farming or meteorological responsibilities.
Mr. Hendrickson wrote a book, ‘‘Winds of the Fish’s Tail’’ (1996), on the history of weather on Long Island. Few knew more about the topic than he did. But even Mr. Hendrickson acknowledged the existence of some weather phenomena too extraordinary to be measured.
‘‘There aren’t words that can tell you the beautiful condition of the sky,’’ he told the Times, reflecting on a sunset.
