Lois Rodden - UAC Lifetime Achievement Award

I met Lois Rodden at the ISAR "Computers and Astrology" conference in July 1996. I was looking to do some astrology research and had heard that she had the largest collection of accurate birth times in the world. So I studied her picture, spotted her in the VIP cocktail party, walked right up to her, and blurted out, "My name is Mark McDonough. I hope to be a significant person in your life." To this day, I have no idea what came over me except perhaps – fate. Lois Rodden has become a very significant person in my life – she has become my mother, mentor, friend and business partner.

Lois and I have been working together on the AstroDatabank for six years, but Lois has been collecting data for over 40 years. That's 40 years of combing through stacks of old magazines and musty references, writing mountains of inquiries to birth registries, and contacting confidants and relatives of the famous and infamous the world over. In these 40 years of determined pursuit, Lois has collected and documented over 26,000 birth data.

I have watched her edit those records several times over the last six years and have no idea where she gets the stamina to focus so intently on so many details.

Having a kitten watching over you though hours of data entry might help, but I suspect it has more to do with her Saskatchewan roots. Where Lois grew up, they regularly found old people each Spring who had died in the snow on their way back from the outhouse.

Perhaps it comes from being a single mother of five children supporting herself in Hollywood on an astrologer's income.

(Don't they look like understudies for the Partridge family?)

Perhaps it comes from the determination that she developed in fighting off five cancers over 20 years. She jokes with her oncologist that she’s a weed – you just can't kill her.

And like a weed, she is also quite prolific. In addition to all the lives she has documented in the Rodden AstroDatabank she has written eight books in astrology.

Mercury Method of Chart Comparison, based on her research into couple’s compatibility.

Modern Transits, the second-best-selling book on transits after Rob Hand’s opus.

Money: How to Find It with Astrology, based on her research into vocational and business astrology.

plus five books of birth data and charts.

Like an actor who gets typecast because they were just too good in one role, Lois has had a hard time breaking out of the "data queen" mold. I recommend that you take a look at her astrology books as well. The same meticulous attention to detail goes into her books, as goes into her data research. You won’t find off-the-cuff speculative astro-logic. You will find insight gleaned from the examination of thousands of charts over several decades.

So who is Lois Rodden, the person? Let’s look at the chart:

Lois has Sun in Gemini, Moon in Cancer, and Aquarius rising. Her first degree Gemini Sun brings journalistic talent and her Cancer Moon brings an appreciation for cataloging the past. Saturn is the most powerful planet in her chart. It is the most elevated and the focus of a bucket.

Now here’s a piece of irony. Lois Rodden, the queen of accurate birth times, doesn't have a birth record to back up her birth time. Lois's record in the AstroDatabank has a Rodden Rating of C for "caution" because it was rectified from an approximate time.

Lois began studying astrology with the Church of Light in 1962 and became a charter member of Professional Astrologers, Inc. in September 1968.

She also became a charter member of the reincorporated ISAR in 1979.

We snuck these photos out of Lois’s scrapbook from the AFA 1980 convention.

It was in the early 80’s that she joined the ISAR board and began work with Mark Pottenger on the Rodden-ISAR database – the progenitor of the AstroDatabank.

Try as she might, though, nothing can shake our image of Lois Rodden the Data Queen whose high standards for data integrity have changed astrology forever.

B.R. (Before Rodden): Charts were published in books and magazines with no source. Speculative charts were placed next to birth certificate charts and no one knew the difference. Some folks might shake their heads in dismay, but Lois shook her fists and started a campaign to change this. She started collecting birth data and filed them away in shoeboxes. She found out which data were reliable and which ones were dirty data cited over and over because no one knew any better.

To help sort out the reliable data from the unreliable data, she invented a simple coding scheme.

There are other more fine-grained rating systems, but Lois pared hers down to the bare minimum so it would be remembered and used. The Rodden Rating system is now the universal standard for rating the accuracy of birth data according to its source.

Lois has been relentless in writing letters to the editors of all the major astrological publications, urging them to tighten their loose data standards. Athens killed Socrates with poison hemlock for being a gadfly, but in the six years I have been representing her around the world, I have never heard a bad word spoken about Lois Rodden – just admiration for her hard work and dedication to high standards. Lois’s dedication to truth and accuracy is so pure that no one ever took offense to her constant corrections. So instead of the poison hemlock, the astrological community, in 1992, awarded her the Regulus Award for Enhancing Astrology's Image, and today gives her its Lifetime Achievement award.

Today Lois Rodden’s web site, AstroDatabank.com, is the most popular web site for serious students of astrology. 35,000 people come to AstroDatabank.com every month to view the charts and biographies that Lois has written about people in the news.

Every day astrologers from around the world post their analyses of these charts. I’m always amazed at the quality of their contributions. It is practically a master’s class on-line. There’s a new newsmaker to analyze every two weeks and it’s free.

The web site is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There is a mountain of work on the CD that underlies the newsmakers posted on the web site.

Researchers seven generations from now will still be indebted to her for the millions of hours she has spent documenting over 26,000 lives with a Rodden Rating, categories and biographies. For each of these lives she has assigned at least one and usually over three categories for future research. The AstroDatabank includes over 800 possible categories.

Imagine knowing 26,000 people well enough to classify them among 800 categories. Each category is a potential research study whose results will be garnered for generations.

Lois Rodden’s tireless work and steadfast commitment to data validation has truly laid the foundation for the type of scientific research that will ultimately win back for astrology the respect it deserves. A new generation of books and articles is now being written with much more substance because the theories and concepts are based on an easy access to the thousands of data in Lois Rodden’s AstroDatabank.

Lois Rodden is receiving the UAC award for lifetime achievement tonight because it takes a lifetime to collect, check, code and annotate all the birth data now housed in the AstroDatabank CD. Without her Rodden Rating system, we would still be in the “Garbage in, Garbage out” world of astrology research. She is a national – no – international research treasure and her legacy will long outlast her lifetime. I feel quite blessed to have been elected to lead the team that built the software to house Lois’s life's work. We as a community are blessed that Lois Rodden’s life’s passion has given us a cornerstone for rebuilding the respect that astrology so richly deserves. Congratulations and thank you Lois.

To UAC and the members of ISAR, AFAN and NCGR, It was an immense honor and deeply gratifying to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at UAC, Orlando. I went home and savored the moment and it will remain in my scrapbook of memories as the epitome of my work. As I went on the stage, I wanted to thank my friend and partner, Mark McDonough, for the design and creation of the AstroDatabank as a quality product, for believing in the value of what we were doing and for putting his money where his mouse was. I also wanted to thank everyone who sent in data, who corrected data, who quoted data sources and who contributed to the improvement of quality of our field by caring for accurate data, as I am not alone; we are a Community. Thank you to all of you, Lois M. Rodden   Lois Rodden Left Us Today June 5, 2003, Yucaipa CA. It is my sad duty to report that Lois Rodden left her body today (June 5, 2003) at around 8:30 AM PDT, in Yucaipa, CA. She chose a powerful time to leave. Neptune was on her ascendant and a Jupiter/Moon conjunction straddled her descendant. She always told me that Jupiter should be involved in a death because from the soul's point of view it was such a great boon to leave. Lois is in the enviable position of leaving this earth with a job well done – a substantial job well done. Her work has changed astrology for all time. When she entered the field, there were no standards for data integrity. (Saturn is conjunct her MC and at the handle of a bucket.) Incorrect birth data were innocently repeated over and over. The computer acronym – GIGO (Garbage In; Garbage Out) – comes to mind. Things are different now. Better books and articles are being written because they are grounded in a broad base of thousands of clean and well-organized birth data. Every serious astrological writer now checks their work against the data in her AstroDatabank. Lois died of cancer (her seventh) and was ready to go without fear. She regrets not being able to attend college in this life but has firm plans of attending an Ivy League university in her next life. She leaves behind five children, many friends, and a field that is forever in her debt. She died at home with all her children in attendance. It was an honor to be at her passing. When she left I quoted one of my favorite couplets from Hamlet: "Now cracks a noble heart... May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” Six months before she died Lois named her successor. After three years of trying out different authors, a name came to her in a flash. Pat Taglilatelo would be perfect. And she is. Pat has been working as Lois's understudy since January and is now prepared to assume the mantel. Lois Rodden's legacy will continue for many decades to come. Surely she is in a better place now and having a glorious time pawing through the Akashic records looking up those birth times that eluded her down here. Her great friend and business partner, Mark McDonough