BonnerSprings.com

Gil Hoag was watching the weather before watching the weather was cool.

Long before the days of the weather channel, Hoag began monitoring and recording daily weather patterns in Bonner Springs.

He's not a meteorologist, although he would have like to have been one. He's just a man who loves watching the weather.

Hoag is the official Bonner Springs weather observer for the National Weather Service. He reports the high temperature, the low temperature and the moisture to the weather service every day. He's held the position since 1985.

It wasn't the weather service that piqued his interest in the weather, however. It's just something he's always enjoyed.

"I don't know how the National Weather Service heard about me. They just called me up one day and asked me if I'd like to do it," he said.

Hoag keeps track of the daily, monthly and yearly rainfall with a rain gage that weighs the moisture each day. Hoag said he has been asked by neighbors what he'd doing with a rocket in his backyard.

However they heard of him, they couldn't have found a more perfect fit.

Hoag has been tracking the area's daily highs and lows and its rainfall for more than a quarter of a century. With a quick glance through his stack of meticulously-maintained notebooks, Hoag can give recite weather information from the Bonner Springs area dating back to 1973.

The daily ritual of reading and resetting the thermometer and checking the rain gage in his back yard is a labor of love. It's certainly not for the money.

"When the weather service asked me to do it, they said they'd pay me $10 a week," he said. "And a couple of months ago they came and put a digital thermometer in the back yard and they raised it then to $13 a week. Of course, I'd do it for free anyway."

He recently retired from the Kansas Department of Transportation. It was a good career, he said. But he would have liked to have made a living studying the weather.

"I always wanted to do that, but I think the math would have killed me," he said. "But I think I can predict the weather as well as they do."

A digital thermometer in Hoag's backyard keeps an accurate record of the days' high and low temperatures.

A fan of the weather channel, Hoag said he's noticed a change over the past few years in the way weather is reported.

"We used to hear about squaw lines all the time. You just don't hear that anymore," he said. "And cold waves. We used to get those all the time. If you notice, we don't get those anymore.

Some of what you hear in the nightly weather reports comes from Hoag and his counterparts in other communities.

For the past five or six years he's been the official weather watcher for meteorologist Brian Busby on Kansas City's channel 9 and he has a weekly weather report in the Bonner Springs-Edwardsville Chieftain and the Basehor Sentinel.

"When you hear on television that four inches of snow was reported in Bonner Springs, that comes from me," he said. "Brian Busby usually refers to me as Gil from Bonner. It's funny when people find out I'm the one reporting that, they say, 'Oh, you're Gil from Bonner.'"

As far as any long-term predictions about what type of winter it will be, Hoag has no comment. He knows enough about the weather, he said, to know better than to make a prediction.