Posted on 03/16/2022 10:08:39 AM PDT by PROCON
The sun rose at 8:27 AM on January 7, 1974. Children in the Washington area had left for school in the dark that morning, thanks to a new national experiment during a wrenching energy crisis: most of the US went to year-round daylight saving time beginning on January 6. “It was jet black” outside when her daughter was supposed to leave for school, Florence Bauer of Springfield told the Washington Post. “Some of the children took flashlights with them.”
The change would benefit Americans in the long run, predicted Steve Grossman of the Department of Transportation. Yes, accidents in the morning darkness may become more common, he said, but longer daylight hours could mean eliminating the hazards of evening commutes: “stress, anxiety, and many drivers have had a couple of drinks,” as he told the Post. Outside the capital, others vowed defiance: Robert Yost, the mayor of St. Francis, Kansas said his town’s council “felt it was time to put our foot down and stop this monkey business.”
Now as the idea of permanent daylight saving time has gained some political momentum, it’s probably worth a look back to another period when the US tinkered with time.
Congress had voted on December 14, 1973, to put the US on daylight saving time for two years. President Nixon signed the bill the next day. The US had gone to permanent daylight saving time before, during World War II. Then, too, the measure was enacted to save fuel. Permanent DST wasn’t close to the wackiest idea about time floating around—Paul Mullinax, a geographer who worked at the Pentagon, came up with the idea of putting the continental US on a single time zone. “USA Time” would apply from Bangor to Barstow, eliminate jet lag, and standardize TV schedules. His idea even got traction in Congress, via a bill from US Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii. “The human being is a very adaptive animal,” he said. “There is no reason we have to be a slave to the sun.”
And yet the early-morning darkness quickly proved dangerous for children: A 6-year-old Alexandria girl was struck by a car on her way to Polk Elementary School on January 7; the accident broke her leg. Two Prince George’s County students were hurt in February. In the weeks after the change, eight Florida kids were killed in traffic accidents. Florida’s governor, Reubin Askew, asked for Congress to repeal the measure. “It’s time to recognize that we may well have made a mistake,” US Senator Dick Clark of Iowa said during a speech in Congress on January 28, 1974. In the Washington area, some schools delayed their start times until the sun caught up with the clock.
The factual picture was a bit more complicated. The National Safety Council reported in February that pre-sunrise fatalities had risen to 20 from 18 the year before. In July, Roger Sant, then an assistant administrator-designate for the Federal Energy Administration, wrote a letter to the Post that noted a 1 percent energy saving achieved by going to DST equated to 20,000-30,000 tons of coal not being burned each day. Further, he wrote, accidents had fallen in the afternoons.
By August, though, as the Watergate scandal caused the Nixon administration to crumble, the country was ready to move on from its clock experiments. While 79 percent of Americans approved of the change in December 1973, approval had dropped to 42 percent three months later, the New York Times reported. Seven days after President Nixon resigned, US Senator Bob Dole of Kansas introduced an amendment in August that would end the DST experiment. It passed. A similar bill passed the House. In late September, the full Congress passed a bill that would restore standard time on October 27. President Ford signed it on October 5. Energy savings, a House panel noted, “must be balanced against a majority of the public’s distaste for the observance of Daylight Saving Time.”
Excellent idea.
I know that in the 90s when my kids in grade school, the kids had to catch the bus in the dark plenty, even though we had the time changes, just like now. Some kid someplace goes to school in the dark with either standard or savings time. So it doesn’t matter which way we go. Let’s just stop changing it twice a year. Stick with one or the other. I don’t care which.
New England is so far east, it should be in the Atlantic time zone.
Make the NY border the cut off. It keeps getting talked about every year but the Massholes are the ones mucking it up.
What about splitting the difference and moving the clock 30 minutes and leaving it there?
We're slaved to the clock and a business cycle that operates nominally 8 AM to 5 PM daily. The natural sunrise/sunset varies by season and location on the surface of the earth. People on the equator don't care. 12 hours light/12 hours dark. People in above the arctic circle don't care, 6 months light/6 months dark. People in northern tier US states benefit from the standard/savings scheme. Useless daylight between 4:50 AM and 5:50 AM is shifted to a later sunset...8:13 PM -> 9:13 PM (DST) in June. In Winter, standard time brings daylight at 8 AM instead of 9 AM.
Permanent DST will mean sunrise after 9 AM in December and sunset at 5:56 PM. Pocatello, ID times for example.
Sunlight later in the day is still more useful to me than early morning. I work from my home office from 8 AM to midnight weekdays with an hour for dinner with my wife. We have to turn lights on in the morning most of the year to get ready for work.
If the permanent DST passes, I'm fine with it. It means having some light after working hours. The change in December doesn't matter much. It's cold and dark outside anyway.
Screw DST.
Go back to Standard Time and stay there.
It worked for centuries.
I remember it, and the primary reason it was dropped was because the little kids were going to school in the dark.
I am ambivalent to it. I don’t particularly care for dark at 4:45 pm in December, but that’s the way it is.
Run it down the Alleghenies and make it half hour time zones. The east coast is a different world from us in western Pennsylvania as well.
Yes I do. It wasn’t that big a deal.
Personally I would prefer to be on standard time year round.
I guess that'd work for some people. But not me. I like mornings (hate it being dark in the morning).
No he didnt, he just chose to do that.
I wasn’t even born yet.
I certainly remember. It was phased in at the same time as the blacked-out Christmas, in which Christmas lights were discouraged, and the Double Nickel, aka the 55-mph national speed limit. Bill Clinton’s greatest accomplishment was getting rid of the Double Nickel.
Yes, indeed. I want year-round standard time. “Daylight Savings Time” doesn’t save any daylight. It only forces us to get up in what seems to be the middle of the night when we could be getting up with the sun.
A management book I read gave a number of “standard” reasons that new ideas get shot down. One of them was, “We’ve already tried that and it didn’t work.” There are people who will argue against any new idea or any change. They are “naysayers.” There are several reasons people fight against even the best idea. From the book, the fact that I fought against the idea and it eventually worked is because you changed something because of my input. Another was it isn’t their idea and they won’t get credit when it works, also, if they get the idea shot down then they’re one up on you in the who-has-power game. There were other reasons but the thing is any change will be fought against no matter how beneficial it looks or is in practice. It’s politics and politics is a nasty business, no matter how benign the change is.
I was 28 years old and I don’t remember the switch. I do remember the STAR tabloid printing in BIG LETTERS the latest gossip.
“JEAN DIXON SAYS NIXON WILL NOT RESIGN!”
It hit the news stands the very week Nixon resigned.
I remember all that. But now it’s a crime to let your kids walk to school.
I was wondering how long it would take for the negative voices to start sounding off.
If this is a real problem, then start school late from Oct to December. They’re willing to start school late for lazy teenagers.
Vaguely remember it happening. Didn’t affect me, I was a musician and slept til Noon. People probably hated it because it was a change and people don’t like change.
I’m waking up an hour later than usual since the recent time change.
I remember walking the quarter mile to catch the school bus with a flashlight.
What a bunch of BS! Kids in Alaska wait for busses in the dark all the time. No one gets killed.
Idiots need to watch for kids and kids need to stay on the sides of the road.
School can start an hour later is whiney idiots can’t stand it.
As far as savings? What a crock. We are long into LED and fluorescent lights, even if this is true.
End the idiocy. Now.
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