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.”
Of course that defeats the whole “purpose”. If they want everything shifted an hour to get more light after working/ school hours, but then you move school/ work start time to not have it so dark then... well you’ve just undone the first move.
People just need to accept reality. In the winter there just isn’t as much light as we want. That’s why it’s winter. All the jimmying with the clock in the world isn’t going to change the fact that in northern latitudes there’s only 8.5 hours of daylight on dec 21st.
I remember these little reflective stickers that they passed out in elementary school in our district. They were called “hot dots”. They were white and you were supposed to stick them on your clothes or your backpack so that cars could see you better. They didn’t work, because the kids kept putting them on places that they really weren’t supposed to.
They’re not actually being honest about this.
The problem was that Congress set the clocks forward an additional hour that year, so much that the sun did not come up until around 8:30 in the middle latitudes.
So, it wasn’t perpetual DST that caused problems, just the extra hour of it.
I was 23 when this attempt was started. It’s funny...I have zero recollection of this!
I was in a field service engineering job at the time and I was traveling all over the western US with stays at sites ranging from a day to seven months. Since I wasn’t in an office with a regular schedule, it’s not much of a surprise I didn’t know about it. I would move from the eastern edge of the time zone to the western edge which was about an hour’s time difference in daylight anyway. I also worked in Arizona which didn’t observe DST. So I was always discombobulated when it came to clocks, anyway.
You trade an hour of daylight in the morning for an hour in the afternoon. Big woop most people would rather have an hour of daylight in their free time in the afternoon than an hour during the morning commute to their slave dens. Less than 2% of the U.S.economy is agrarian which is.and always will be the reason for DST so you had more time to harvest in the fall months with natural daylight before it got dark in the evenings. Not messing up a person’s sleep pattern is reason enough we are not an agricultural society anymore let’s move into the 21st century. Arizona doesn’t do DST at all. So many bitter hearts it’s sad so many live in misery that any good idea from the government is immediately bad because it’s the government who said it sometimes like not living in the 19th century in a farm time schedule it actually is a good.idea.
I think they should just have school start an hour later in general. I think school starts too early for kids.
I remember when they tried to switch to the metric system.
That didn’t work either.
That's what I say. Back to basics. Let the Earth do what it is the Earth is designed to do.
Indiana was on Standard Time and did not mess with changing our clocks in that era. And Standard Time is what we need, permanently. Just quit with the government making a mess of everything.
I have always hated Daylight Savings Time. It was a canard from the beginning. Time Zones correct much of the problem. Years ago, I had a car accident on my commute because on the the Monday after DST had started on Sunday. I don’t care which time choice we use, pick one and stick with it!
Ah what the hell ... without DST during May and June the sun will be rising at about 4 a.m. here in California.
I was in my 20s and I don’t remember
“I was in the Marine Corps at the time.”
I was at some undisclosed spot on the Pacific.
That was the year I graduated High School. I recall the time, but not being necessarily stressed about how dark the dawn was. When you’re in such a situation, one usually just accepts the way nature is presented to you. I was used to boarding the local bus when it was somewhat dark. Oh well. It’s morningtime. Doesn’t stay dark all day.
I remember. Yep, I’m old.
The current proposal is to change to DST all year, just like they tried in 1974. IMHO, we should ditch DST altogether. In the winter, it will get dark earlier in evening, but you won’t have to get up in the dark.
Among other things, there were sensational news articles aplenty about school children being injured or worse while walking to school or waiting for school buses in the dark.
That being said, they might get away with it this time since (1)almost nobody walks to school anymore and (2)school busses come practically to the front door.
Fun fact: before we were all interconnected by railroads (who pushed for us to be organized into time zones) pretty much everybody’s current time was whatever the local big clock at the town square was set to. Some towns adjusted their clock to correspond with the sunrise (to be fair, they had to adjust their clocks anyway because the clocks kept poor time, so the sunrise was used as the standard). There was no concern with being on the same time with other towns -— again until the railroads became a thing and wanted some standards on setting clocks to help them with their predicting of departure and arrival times.
Slightly different in the USN. I was always in the dark. Part of the clueless 2%.
Half hour zones would reduce that to a mere 20 minutes difference.
Wasn’t some or part of Hawaii like that when Pearl Harbor was bombed? I seem to recall reading years ago that part of putting together the puzzle after the fact and building a timeline of events was difficult until they realized the half-hour offset thing.
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