…[H]istory is more than a list of dates and events. It’s the stories we tell of the past, and how they shape our world. My favorite figure from Lompoc’s history is Gin Chow, a fortune teller and sometimes-accurate prophet from the earliest days of our cityhood. Chow was a Chinese immigrant who moved to Lompoc in 1890 to tend a small farm. He gained local notoriety in 1925, when he accurately predicted the Santa Barbara earthquake. Soon, the Los Angeles Times asked Chow to provide daily weather predictions, which not even he took seriously. A folk story remains wherein Chow predicted rain, then went out to water his crops the same day.
