Back in my reporting days, I cranked out copious copy on weather stories: heat waves, floods, droughts, ice storms, tornadoes, anything that turned today’s weather into tomorrow’s news, which worked well on a daily newspaper but not so on a weekly.

A regular weekly reader, in fact, was quick to say – and repeat as often as the situation presented – he wouldn’t have known it had snowed a foot had I not written about it four days later.

But such wagging didn’t daunt my weather coverage, no matter how belated, and I discredited this particular chap’s criticism by noting he wasn’t from around here anyway, having moved to town 45 years ago from New York, where weather stories undoubtedly were buried by crime news.

My affinity for weather stories began when the first black and white television set was brought into our living room, and I fanaticized about becoming a “weathergirl,” pointing on a huge map and forecasting smiley-faced sunshine or teary-eyed raindrops night after night to an adoring viewing public. The weather segment of the news was sponsored by the local power company, so the joke around our house was that that was the reason the weatherman, who often slurred his words, staggered onstage and pointed to the wrong region on the map, was always lit.

Some people, I reckoned, just didn’t take the weather seriously enough. They didn’t go around with their noses stuck in the Old Farmer’s Almanac or in some weather proverb book reading that the higher the hornet nest, the deeper the expected snowfall.

Some people didn’t understand the news value of a good old weather story, be it about chill factors or wind gusts, about gully-washer rains or shoulder-high snowdrifts. Little did I know … then.

That was then … before weather watchers became meteorologists, before 24-hour weather stations on TV, before five-day, full-color forecasts on the back page of newspapers, before “live” reporting from storm centers, before broadcast “watches,” and “warnings” and “alerts.”

That was then … before the hype, before the media began to whip up the public in a froth of near hysteria every time a winter storm heads up the pike. That was then … before the inane term “weather event” was coined by some TV personality whose strained, shrill voice depicts the urgency of every situation, no matter how unwarranted.

That was then … when weather stories were generated by extraordinary circumstances, not merely when predictions call for Maine to be blanketed by a deep layer of snow during the first week of January.

That’s not news, not even to a wannabe weathergirl, no matter if you stretch it like taffy.