February 4, 1976: Covina cattle rancher Raleigh Waller gets excited as light rain begins to fall. For some 40 days and 40 nights, no winter rains had fallen in L.A., so any moisture was news.

This photo by retired Los Angeles Times photographer Joe Kennedy accompanied a story with the headline, “At Long Last, Basin Gets a .06-Inch Rain.” The Times weather story reported:

Rain and snow fell in Southern California today for the first time since Dec. 12 as a fierce storm in Nevada pushed westward toward the ocean.

At midday precipitation measured .06 of an inch at Los Angeles Civic Center, .49 at Beaumont, .12 at Riverside and .03 at San Bernardino.…

…..The rainfall in Los Angeles so far today brought the seasonal total up to .65 of an inch. Last year at this time 6.60 inches had fallen. The normal for this period is 8.06 inches.

The numbers look small, but this photo and story were published in the Late Final — an updated evening edition of the Los Angeles Times with the day’s news and stocks.  Actually, according to the Feb. 6  Los Angeles Times, 1.78 inches of rain fell during that storm.

From these National Weather Service records, 7.21 inches fell in 1976. The month of January 1976 had no rain. The average for downtown Los Angeles is 14.77 inches.