Soon after Jimmy Carter took office as President of the United States, there was a telephone call from Washington, D. C., to the Krick weather service in Palm Springs, California. The call came from Gretchen Poston, social secretary at the White House. "I wonder if you would be kind enough to do for me what you did for Bess Abell," Mrs. Poston said to Krick. "We plan a number of outside social events-picnics, ballets, luncheons, state dinners, and so forth - and we need to know what the weather is going to be. We'd like to know a month or more ahead."

Krick assured Mrs. Poston, whose friend, Bess Abell, had been social secretary to Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, that he would be honored to serve once again as long-range weather forecaster for the First Family.

The Johnsons had been pleased with his work. "Whether your weather prediction was six days, six weeks, or six months ahead of time, it was always accurate," Bess Abell gratefully wrote Krick at the finish of the Johnson years in the White House. "I leaned on your prediction in selecting the date for the first White House State Dinner in the Rose Garden," she recalled. "I remember it so well - Mr. Choy [Eddie Choy, one of Krick's men] said it would be the perfect night, but the day would give us ulcers - there would be dark clouds and high winds, but no rain.

"How right he was! About four o'clock in the afternoon everyone wanted to move tables, place cards and bouquets inside-but I stood firm by your prediction. At eight o'clock when the guests arrived, it was the lovely, calm and balmy evening you promised. What a beautiful, memorable night it was . . ."

Referring to another of Krick's forecasts, Mrs. Abell continued, "Who else in the world would be able to pick the one day in November for Mrs. Johnson to picnic and hike through the Redwoods under clear skys? For weeks before and after that day it rained, but her day there was perfectly delightful. . . ." Mrs. Johnson added her own note of thanks to Krick, writing that his "well-known-in-advance predictions have been of invaluable help in planning everything from parties on the White House lawn to picnics on the coast of Maine."

Actually, Krick says, he could have told President Carter five years ago that he would have the kind of day he did for his inauguration - that it would be cold but sunny, allowing him and his family to stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue in comfort after the ceremony. "We couldn't predict who the President would be," Krick said, "but we knew what kind of day it would be."

Krick is an old hand at forecasting the weather for the White House. He began when he predicted the conditions for the inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, following this in turn with the same service for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Krick's abilities had been well-known to Ike, for it was Krick, along with a former student of his at the California Institute of Technology, who forecast the critical five days Eisenhower needed to complete the invasion of Normandy in World War II - holding out for his own forecast even though all the other weathermen involved in this awesome decision, including four Britishers, stood against him, insisting that a five-day forecast was impossible.

Krick, in 1969, also forecast the drought of the 1970s, which for several years dried up the country. And as the dry areas have gotten wider and wider and lasted longer and longer - as Krick had said would happen - the calls for his cloud-seeding services to bring rain have increased from farmers, ranchers, hydroelectric firms, water users everywhere, both at home and overseas.

The clients keep coming to Krick, despite unremitting efforts of the United States Weather Bureau to discredit him. The government claims his methods are "unscientific" and deny that he is able to do the things for which his customers have been paying him handsome fees, some for as long as thirty years. No man can predict the weather for more than about two days, the Weather Bureau argues. After that, the accuracy of the forecast falls off rapidly.

Krick agrees that the weather can't be forecast beyond two days -by the Weather Bureau. "They have no effective forecast methods," he explains. "They go at it wrong. They deal with effect instead of cause. They haven't recognized that the atmosphere operates as a unit and is controlled by extraterrestrial forces, not by what they observe near the surface. That's only a reflection of all that is going on from the top of the atmosphere down."

Nor have all the satellites fired into space to send back pictures of what's going on in the atmosphere, along with other information, made any difference in the Weather Bureau's forecasting accuracy, Krick maintains, saying disdainfully, "These only mean more misinformation sent out more often to more people."

As for seeding the clouds with silver iodide to increase rain and snow, the government considers this to be of doubtful merit, too. After thirty years or so of trying it, and as two-thirds of the nation's 3,000 counties received emergency relief in what the New York Times headlined as the Worst Drought in Centuries, it still classified cloud-seeding for more rain as "experimental," needing yet more "research." The refusal of the government to acknowledge that the question was settled long ago: that cloud seeding is a sound, well-established scientific procedure, Krick contends "has cost this country billions -not millions-billions. The catastrophic droughts we've been hit with in the Seventies could have been prevented."