The illustrator, author, and landscape painter Eric Sloane was born in New York City. He ran away from home at an early age and worked his way across America painting signs on barns, stores, and buildings. Later he studied at the Art Students’ League, the New York School of Fine and Applied Art, and the School of Fine Arts at Yale University. A man of many interests, Sloane was fascinated with meteorology and is credited with having been the first television weatherman. While restoring an old farmhouse in Connecticut he became fascinated by early American rural architecture and tools, and became an authority on these subjects.