PORTLAND – Marty Engstrom, whose deadpan delivery of the weather from the summit of Mount Washington became a fixture on Portland TV station WMTW, is getting ready to call it quits.

Engstrom, 65, plans to retire this summer. No date has been set, but David Kaufman, executive vice president of WMTW Broadcast Group, said Engstrom probably will stop appearing on the station in late June.

With his trademark bow tie, thick New England accent and ear-to-ear grin at the close, Engstrom has been providing reports on conditions atop the highest peak in the Northeast for 38 years.

Engstrom, who lives in his native Fryeburg, works primarily as an engineer, running the station’s transmitter on Mount Washington in New Hampshire.

He said he told his bosses at WMTW he wants to retire, but will “stick around as long as they need me.” But since the station began broadcasting from a tower in Baldwin in February, instead of from Mount Washington, they don’t need him as much as they used to.

The only reason for Engstrom and his co-workers to go up the mountain now is to run the WMTW-owned generating facility, which provides electricity to other buildings on the summit.

Engstrom says that once he retires he plans to “go home and catch up on 40 years of chores.”

His typical work schedule for WMTW requires him to be in the station’s mountaintop building eight days in a row, then have six days off.

Engstrom says he is not “intentionally a weatherman.”

After a stint in the Air Force, he got a commercial radio license and began looking for jobs with local TV and radio stations.

He landed the job with WMTW, and soon after was asked to do a short report on weather conditions from the summit.

“I guess they had been doing it right up there from the beginning, and then they stopped doing it,” Engstrom said. “But it was popular, and I guess they figured they could use me to do it since I’d be up there.”

In an age of computer graphics, Engstrom still uses a cardboard backdrop of the old Summit House Hotel on the mountain.

“People grew up with Martin, they definitely have a warm spot for him,” Kaufman said. “He has a very unique cachet.”