Spring Forward!
Nothing chases away the late winter cold weather blues like looking through a seed catalog and planning your garden. Before you know it, Spring will be popping up all over the backcountry. The pastures are already tinted a fresh bright green and the grazing animals are either nibbling on the fresh grass or laying under an oak tree with full bellies thinking about an afternoon nap. Daylight saving time is just around the corner. On March 10th we will “Spring ahead” and turn our clocks ahead one hour. It will still be dark in the morning but our afternoons and early evenings will be daylight longer.
Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Saving Time, but the Navajo Nation does. The Hopi Reservation, which is entirely surrounded by the Navajo Nation, doesn’t observe Daylight Saving Time. So, there is a donut-shaped area within Arizona that does observe the time change but the “hole” in the center does not.
Some Amish communities in the US and Canada observe Daylight Saving Time and some do not. They use the term “fast time” or “English time,” preferring to observe what they term “slow time.”
After the 1973 oil embargo, when Congress extended Daylight Saving Time to 8 months, the U.S. Department of Transportation found that we saved the equivalent in energy of 10,000 barrels of oil each day – a total of 600,000 barrels in each of those two years.
In 1986, Daylight Saving Time moved from the end of April to the first Sunday in April. No change was made to the ending date of the last Sunday in October. Changing April to Daylight Saving Time saved us about 300,000 barrels of oil each year.
A study by the U.S. Law Enforcement Assistance Administration found that crime was down 10 to 13 percent, so light in the evening is most welcome.
To keep to their published timetables, trains cannot leave a station before the scheduled time. So, when the clocks fall back, all Amtrak trains in the U.S. must stop at 2:00 a.m. and wait one hour before resuming. Overnight passengers may find their train at a dead stop and their travel time an hour longer than expected.
Patrons of bars that stay open past 2:00 a.m. lose one hour of drinking time on the day when Daylight Saving Time springs forward one hour. This has led to problems in many locations, and sometimes even riots. At a “time riot” in Athens, Ohio, the site of Ohio University, over 1,000 students and other late-night partiers threw liquor bottles at the police attempting to control the riot.
The idea of daylight saving was first conceived by Benjamin Franklin during his American delegate assignment in Paris in 1784.
The idea was first advocated seriously by London builder William Willett (1857-1915) who proposed that advancing clocks 20 minutes on each of four Sundays in April and retarding them by the same amount on four Sundays in September.
During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt instituted year-round Daylight Saving Time, called “War Time,” from February 9, 1942 to September 30, 1945. From 1945 to 1966, there was no federal law regarding Daylight Saving Time, so states were free to choose whether or not to observe. This confused, especially for the broadcasting industry, as well as for railways, airlines, and bus companies. Because of the different local customs and laws, radio and TV stations and transportation companies had to publish new schedules every time a state or town began or ended Daylight Saving Time. On January 4, 1974, President Nixon signed into law the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act of 1973. Then, on January 6, 1974, after implementing the Daylight Saving Time Energy Act, clocks were set ahead. On October 5, 1974, Congress amended the Act, and Standard Time returned on October 27, 1974. Daylight Saving Time resumed on February 23, 1975, and ended on October 26, 1975.
This year, we set our clocks ahead on Sunday March 10th and set them back on Sunday, November 3rd. A good way to remember is we “Spring Forward” in the Spring and “Fall Back” in the Fall. It’s also a good time to check the batteries in your smoke alarms. Over 67% of households have weak or dead batteries in their smoke alarms.
All the information in this article was gathered from several sources and is deemed reliable but not guaranteed. If you’re thinking of buying or selling a home, ranch or land please call us for a free market analysis.
