On Wed, 24 Feb 2010 09:33:06 +0800, Robert Bannister <robban1@bigpond.com> wrote:
>It depends where you live and what time school starts and finishes in >your area. To get to school by 8 or 8:15 am, some country kids need to >be on the school bus by 7. Now, when daylight saving was first >introduced, it only covered the summer months, but then they had to >tamper with it, so that by the end of the period now, 7 am is before >sunrise.
I first moved to Arizona in the summer of 1966, which was just after Congress standardized daylight time. The act required that a state wanting to opt out of daylight time had to pass a law to that effect, and the Arizona legislature (just as klutzy then as now) failed to do so. So we had daylight time. One thing Arizonans don't need is another hour of sunlight in the evening; when the sun goes down you can actually feel the cool coming on.
The drive-in movies didn't start until nine and meahwhile you had to sit in your car in the heat waiting for sundown. In September the kids went to school in the dark; the paper had a photo of a bunch of students waiting for their school bus near a fire, built, it said, to ward off coyotes.
Nobody liked daylight time and the legislature got off its collective butt and passed the law. Arizona has been without daylight time ever since (save for the Navajo Nation, which adds its own confusion since the enclaved Hopi Nation stays on standard time).
Prior to national daylight time standardization daylight time was adopted by local jurisdictions, sometimes by whole states, sometimes by individual cities. When I was a young man Ohio had no state daylight time, and local jurisdictions did it. My hometown of Warren OH adopted daylight time, but it did not apply to the rest of the county (which did not have the authority to adopt such a law). Almost everyone in the county used daylight time since Warren was the county seat and business center. The one group of businesses that didn't use daylight time were the bars in the county. By remaining on standard time they were able to stay open until 2:30 AM EST, legal closing time; but on the daylight time we were all functioning on that was 3:30 AM.
Unfortunately, each jurisdiction was free to choose the start and end dates for their daylight time. When I was in school in Troy NY in the 1950s my roommate arranged dates for us at Green Mountain College in Poultney Vermont. We had to make a stop at his home in Williamstown MA before proceeding into Vermont. Now Williamstown MA is only about forty miles east of Troy NY and only about thirty miles south of Poultney VT, but each state had different daylight time start dates, and this was during that time of year. We managed to get totally confused about what time it was where, and by the time we arrived at Green Mountain College our dates had gone on without us. (We did manage to find a couple of other girls who agreed to go out with us.)
-- ************* DAVE HATUNEN (hatunen@cox.net) ************* * Tucson Arizona, out where the cacti grow * * My typos & mispellings are intentional copyright traps *
