10-26-02: Time to move backwards again

10-26-02: Time to move backwards again

By JANIE SOUTHARD
The Daily Standard

    Time and time again it happens - well, twice a year, to be exact. Clock
day. Up an hour, back an hour. Spring ahead. Fall behind.
    Daylight Saving Time (DST) will end for this year at 2 a.m. Sunday and everyone can catch an extra hour of sleep, except in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, portions of Indiana and most of Arizona where they donšt bother with DST anyway.
    During the past six months, most of the local working population has put last spring's animosity aside. They've long ago forgotten, or forgiven,
those early April days of dragging around grousing about the lost hour of sleep.
    Now it's fall back and look forward to being well rested mornings, at least for awhile until biological clocks are caught up and it becomes same
old-same old.
    So, who won't get the word on the time change? Farm animals, to name one group. Will it be difficult to get them on a new schedule? Will farmers have to ease livestock into a new schedule?
    Heck, no, said Joe Beiler, agriculture agent with the OSU Extension in
Mercer County.
    "Where dairy is concerned, there's always food and water available. So, time of day doesn't mean much where feeding is concerned," Beiler told The Daily Standard earlier this week.
    As to milking, it is up to the individual farmer whether he changes the daily schedule to accommodate the new time.
    "Whatever works for the farmer will work for the cow," Beiler said, adding that he personally would not mind DST all year long.
    A straw poll found Beiler to be in the minority.
    So, whose bright idea was it to move time around?
    In the early 1900s, Englishman William Willett was struck by the fact that "the clean, bright light of an early morning during spring and summer months is so seldom seen or used."
    British Summer Time was introduced in 1916 in England by an act of Parliament and during World War I many other European countries adopted the concept.
    The United States got seriously into the act during World War II and went Europe one better by keeping DST all year round for about three years until the war was over.
    Until the Uniform Time Act of 1966, each state's towns and villages made their own decisions about whether to spring ahead. At one time a trip from Indiana to West Virginia required clock adjustments more than seven times.
    Although the Uniform Time Act did not require any location to observe
DST, it did require that if DST was to be observed, it had to run from the
last Sunday of April to the last Sunday of October.
    In 1986, Congress decided to spring way ahead and moved the annual DST starting date to the first Sunday in April.
    According to statistics, DST has a lot going for it. The federal department of transportation says it saves energy, saves lives, prevents traffic injuries and prevents crime.
    And, as long as Ohio residents are roaming around the house resetting
their clocks, Robert R. Rielage, state fire marshal, says it is a good time to change smoke detector batteries, too.

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