March 7, 2007
Time, Save Arizona,
Is Shifting

DST.  It’s early this year.  Back in 2005 Congress, always ready and willing to fight the hard fight and make the tough decisions, decided on the best way to fight both the energy crisis and global warming.  They moved Daylight Savings Time up three weeks.  May I hear a big “whoopee”?  So next Sunday our nation is not going to spring forward but rather winter up, as spring is still a couple of weeks on down the road. 

Wanting to learn more about Daylight Savings Time, I googled the subject only to receive a grammar tutorial.  “It’s Daylight Saving Time”, I was cautioned, “Not savings as most people (who me?) incorrectly label the action.  “Saving” I was told, “is used as a verbal adjective (a participle).  It modifies time and tells us more about its nature.  Like saving a ballgame rather than a savings account.” 

To which I respond “ Oh bite me!”  First off, saving is in no way involved.  The amount of available sunlight remains constant to the day, no matter what the clock says.  So the spring ahead/fall back syndrome in reality saves nothing.  It’s actually daylight shifting time. Put that in your participle and smoke it, great Google grammarian. 

The concept of moving sunlight to later in the day was first broached by Benjamin Franklin in 1784 and for almost 200 years was better known for aggravating the populace than actually accomplishing any mission. 

In the fifties, my village, Cambridge, Illinois, was standard time year round.  Thirty miles away the cities of Moline and Rock Island were daylight saving.  Why the difference?  Because farmers worked from dawn ‘til dusk, city folk don’t. And on daylight saving, when farmers got to town Saturday night, the stores were closed.  Why didn’t retailers stay open later?  Because they’d never done so in the past.  And you wondered why Wal-Mart took over Main Street America easier than Germany marched through France.  

Besides, as retired farmer Frank Gustafson once explained in the have no doubt style unique to the truly knowledgeable, Daylight Saving was “commie time” while Central Standard was “God’s time.”  I offered, that manifesto must be found only in the Lutheran Bible because we Methodists hadn’t read anywhere in Revelations where God was on Central Standard.  The stare I received in return made me happy burning heretics at the stake was no longer in vogue. 

It wasn’t just Cambridge.  In 1965, St. Paul embraced the daylight time shift while their neighbors to the West, Minneapolis, refused to go along.  You think that wasn’t a long summer in the Twin Cities? 

In some areas of our land, not that much has changed since LBJ standardized DST in ‘66.  Arizona opted out.  For reasons known only to Grand Canyon state citizens, their time is shiftless.  Arizona clocks neither spring forward nor fall back.  Fine for them, but hell on the neighbors.  Before motoring south, one must know whether folks in the Valley of the Sun are in the season where they’re the same time as California or in step with us.  The Maynard’s appear incapable of grasping the Arizona time concept.  I’ve risen early and driven straight through from Grand Junction to Cave Creek for a two o’clock tee time, only to be informed I’d arrived an hour and a half early.  But the funeral for Jan’s aunt in Topock found us arriving halfway through the service.