Daylight Saving Time possibly permanent 11/2023
One of the crazier facts about life in the United States is this: For roughly two decades, nobody had any clue what time it was.
In office buildings, it could be 4 p.m. on one floor and 5 p.m. on another — an important matter for several reasons, including who punched out first to get to happy hour. People would step off airplanes with no idea how to set their watches. Ponder this head-scratcher:
“A short trip from Steubenville, Ohio, to Moundsville, West Virginia became a symbol of the deteriorating situation. A bus ride down this thirty-five-mile stretch of highway took less than an hour. But along that route, the local time changed seven times.”
That “deteriorating situation,” as historian Michael Downing put it in his book
“Spring Forward,” is the reason that millions of Americans reset their clocks at 2 a.m. this past Sunday, losing an hour of sleep but gaining an hour of daylight...........
These were nutty times, Downing writes, with some localities observing daylight saving, some not:
Left to their own devices, private enterprise and local governments — which had repeatedly demanded the right not to alter their clocks — took to changing the time as often as they changed their socks, setting off a nationwide frenzy of time tampering …
Especially in Iowa, which had 23 different daylight saving dates. “If you wanted to get out of Iowa, you had to time your departure carefully,”
Downing writes. “Motorists driving west through the 5 p.m. rush hour in Council Bluffs, Iowa, found themselves tied up in the 5 p.m. rush hour in Omaha, Nebraska, an hour later.”
The historian also offers this truly astonishing fact: “By 1963, no federal agency of commission was even attempting to keep track of timekeeping practices in the United States.”..........
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/h...ca-s-clock-craziness/ar-AAV8lVN?ocid=msedgntp