Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.

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As Valentine's Day, 1960, approached, many Southwest Virginians probably thought winter was over.

January had been the warmest since the balmy winters of the early 1950s, and there had been a measly 4.8 inches of snow for the season at Woodrum Field (now known as the Roanoke Regional Airport).

Really, it had been a long time since there had been much winter at all. In a dozen years before 1960, Roanoke had a season total greater than 18 inches of snow just once. Less than 10 inches had fallen in five of those winters, including the previous winter, when only 7.9 inches fell throughout the 1958-59 winter.

But what would happen in the next four weeks, beginning on Feb. 14, 1960, would prove to be a watershed event in Roanoke's modern climatic history.

With one massive eastern U.S. winter storm each week until the second week of March, Roanoke collected about 58 inches of snow in those four weeks alone. There's been nothing like it before or since.

And our area's winters were much different after 1960 than they had been before. The 1960 explosion of snow, which piled up in deep drifts that lasted into late March, was the beginning of period that lasted many years when snow became common in Southwest Virginia's winters.

Beginning with those four weeks in 1960, 13 consecutive winters would produce at least 20 inches of snow.

Ten would produce at least 30 inches, five at least 40.

Stretching the period another 10 years, only four winters between 1960 and 1983 would produce less than 20 inches of snow for the season in Roanoke.

It's a period that has left a lasting mark on seasonal averages and winter expectations in our area.

In the first 11 years of Roanoke's official weather records at Woodrum Field, starting in 1948, the city averaged just 11 inches of snow a winter.

The snowy period of time from 1960 stretching into the early 1980s more than doubled that average to 22.8 inches a winter. It's those 1960s winters, plus a few more in recent times like 1987, 1993 and 1996, that have produced the expectation by many that a Roanoke winter should include foot-deep snow at least once.

This would not have been the expectation immediately after the 1950s, so the four weeks of February and March, 1960, came as quite a shock.

The average monthly temperatures did a strange thing in 1960 -- with all the snow on the ground and an upper air pattern locked in place to bring down Arctic air, March was colder than either January or February. March's average temperature of 33.97 degrees is by far the coldest March on record in Roanoke -- no other March since 1948 has averaged even below 40 degrees.

The next March, in 1961, was more than 16 degrees warmer with an average of 50.05.

The late winter of 1960 was big not just in Virginia, but in regions across the South and into the Northeast. Nashville and Little Rock set all-time seasonal snowfall records that year, as storms continually formed in the northwest Gulf of Mexico and moved east-northeast off the coast near Cape Hatteras.

Some kept going out to sea, but a few turned even farther northeast and brought heavy snow into New York.

The lasting lesson from 1960 is that mid-February is much too early to write off winter, no matter what the weather's been like during the six weeks before -- or even, a decade before.

Winter 2005 is not over yet.

Expecting nearly five feet of snow before the Ides of March would be ridiculous -- remotely possible, but ridiculous.

But 1960 gives us pause to consider that Yogi Berra's line applies as much to winter as it does to baseball -- it ain't over til it's over.

Now would be a good time to note Roanoke's snowfall to date as of Valentine's Day, 2005: a measly 4.3 inches.