STORM TRACK: July 31, 1982 (Volume 5 Issue 5)

That wraps this issue. The next ST will conclude an account of Chase '82, a review of the Editor's record and some interesting "gustnado" encounters, Part VI in John Weaver's excellent. series -- this one on "The Thunderstorm (to 1900)", and more Funnel Funnies.

At this time, I am reluctantly obliged to announce a substantial price increase for Storm Track, beginning with the 1983 Volume and renewal subscriptions due from you after the November 30 issue. Ironically, the reason is the increasing circulation and growing popularity of this newsletter! The number of subscribers has doubled from earlier years, and it is no longer practicable to continue using the copy services which have previously been available to me. This means I must turn to a strictly "cash and carry" operation. I expect the annual price to increase to $3.20. This is based on the assumption of shorter articles after Mr. Weaver's series is concluded and assumes economies of volume in a projection of added subscribers over the coming months. Assuming three 6 page and three 3 page editions, the total additional cost would be $1.00. Admittedly, this may be a quite conservative estimate, and I certainly am not inclined to cut quality or interesting submissions just to follow some arbitrary rule about issue length. However, this seems a reasonable goal and expectation for the coming year. Any costs that I assume over this would be on my own. STs of 4 to 8 pages run 37c for mailing. 3 1/2 pages just breaks under 20c, but 3 1/2 pages doesn't leave very much space to really take off on some material and illustrations which I have in mind for the future. I appreciate that this will strain some budgets and that some may drop out. However, economies are catching up and must be addressed. Oh yes, those who have already paid for future year subscriptions (a small handful) will not be affected by this increase until their long term subscriptions run out.

If anyone has any good ideas on how to cut costs, etc, please let me know. I may write some exploratory letters to camera companies, etc. to see if anyone wants to advertise in something like this (probably unlikely, but who knows).

One final note. I am planning to do a portrait page in a future issue, sketching some of the more active and better known storm chasers over the past ten years, and currently. To this end, I have been collecting candid pictures, when opportunity presents itself. To date, I have fairly good likenesses of Bluestein, Colgate, Davies-Jones, Doswell, Golden, Jensen (Bruce), Leonard, Marshall, Moller, Moore, Rasmussen and Zipser. If any of you want to be included or have any good group pictures to share, please send them to me. I think such a group portrait would be interesting not only to ourselves but to other subscribers who are curious as to what we look like ("Does a tornado chaser really look WEIRD or does he look like anybody?").