Timely View: Lighting Up Your Day Has Its Dark Side

“Would a poll on for or against daylight-savings time be of interest to your readers?” asks Janet Salter of Beverly Hills. “Please take my vote of against as the first one.”

To reinforce her point, Mrs. Salter encloses a poem:

Daylight-savings time is a nasty nomenclature,

Never saves time, has no reason or rhyme

And proves it’s a sin to fool mother nature.

That is a curious poem, to be sure; but its point is clear enough.

At the outset, we should understand that the term is daylight- saving time, not savings , for obvious reasons.

This is the practice by which we all move our clocks forward one hour in the spring and back one hour in the fall (spring forward, fall back). The theory, evidently, is that this gives us an extra hour of daylight in the evening.

Daylight saving dates to World War I, when both Great Britain and Germany adopted it to conserve fuel and power. The United States also adopted daylight saving in World War I but scrapped it in 1919 on the objection of farmers. It was reinstated--year round--throughout World War II.

In 1966 Congress passed the Uniform Time Act, standardizing daylight saving from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October. In 1986 Congress added three weeks of daylight saving by moving the opening date to the first Sunday in April, a move that was applauded by nurseries, softball associations, amusement parks, convenience stores and the sporting-goods industry. (States, however, retained the right to stay on standard time.)

So, most of us set our clocks forward an hour in the spring, and then, in October, set them back. It can readily be seen that this procedure is rather a chore for a time-oriented household like ours. We have 13 house clocks, at last count, plus two wrist watches, two car clocks and a pool clock. Eighteen altogether.

Setting each one may take only a minute or so, but I can’t always remember them. Thus, a week later I may be surprised by glancing at our dining-room clock radio, for example, and thinking it is an hour earlier than it is.

Assuming that it is a good thing to gain an hour’s sunlight, other methods come to mind. Why don’t we just stay on the old time system but do everything an hour earlier? When the sun rises, why can’t we just get up at 6 o’clock, instead of 7? Why can’t our employers ask us to be at work at 8 o’clock, instead of 9?

Obviously, not everyone would comply with this procedure, and the result would be chaos. Why not stay on standard time? There is something blissful about lying in bed after the sun has lighted up your room. Surely, in this southern clime, the day is long enough. Most of us can finish work and get home in daylight.

I haven’t taken the poll Mrs. Salter asks, but I did ask my wife.

“I sort of like it,” she said. “It gives me an extra hour of daylight to work in the yard.”

Good point. But why can’t she get up at the crack of dawn and work in her yard before she goes to work? It seems to me that, rather than adjusting the clock, we could simply adjust our habits. Early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

By the way, that homely axiom reminds me that it was Benjamin Franklin who first thought of daylight-saving time. According to Encyclopedia Americana, he suggested that some method be found to save candles and provide a longer evening of daylight.

“This practice,” argues Mrs. Salter, “is truly an unnecessary nuisance which disturbs electronic clocks and disrupts our dogs, birds and cats, not to mention what it does to babies. . . .”

We have no babies, but I haven’t noticed any disruption of routine in our dogs, birds and cats. When my wife opens the front door in the morning her five wild cats are here, crying to be fed, even though it’s an hour earlier. Our dog may wonder why she is being put out of the house an hour earlier, but our birds don’t seem to care--neither our indoor birds nor our outdoor birds.

What amazes me is why the entire population seems to accept this arbitrary tampering with their clocks--inner and mechanical--without protest. Why do we go on setting our clocks forward in the spring, year after year, only to set them back in the fall? Are we automatons?

Come to think of it, I haven’t set my car clock forward yet. I never remember it until I’m moving, and then it’s too dangerous to change.