My little personal campaign to have Daylight Saving Time year-round is not off to a good start. My wife Regina is the first person I lobbied on the proposal, and she is totally opposed to it.
She is a retired teacher who remembers kids coming to school groggy and dosing off at their desks after the time changed. Most of them had missed an hour of sleep every night.
When the usual arguments against Daylight Saving Time failed to sway me, she resorted to the “God’s time” theory. That means Standard Time was divinely created and we mortals messed it up.
People my age should have a greater voice in this debate than younger folks. We were around before Daylight Saving Time and can offer first-hand comparisons in time change ramifications.
During my early years, it got dark at nighttime. There was not anybody around in Washington then who had the power to tack on another hour of daylight after dusk fell over our neighborhood.
They finally did that in the 1960s with sort of a national mandate for Daylight Saving Time. It was not a total edict, though, because some states like Hawaii and Arizona decided not to honor it. So dark comes at the same time it always has in those places.
Folks like me who favor Daylight Saving Time insist that it helps reduce accidents, save electricity and boost the economy by extending daylight hours for shopping, dining and entertainment.
Longer daylight hours encourage people to exercise more and soak up bigger doses of Vitamin D. All that curtails health care and insurance costs.
Opponents of the extra hour of sunlight concept say, like Regina does, that it disturbs natural sleep patterns and creates fatigue in schools and workplaces. That leads to health problems, they argue.
More daytime results in increased travel, greater consumption of gasoline and expanded use of air conditioning. Anti-Daylight Saving Time folks say that offsets energy savings of more daylight.
Debates over the pros and cons of Daylight Saving Time are not new. Benjamin Franklin proposed longer daytime hours back in the 1700s to save money on candles and lamp oil.
Looking back, kids in the neighborhood where I grew up missed out on a lot of healthy, wholesome fun by not getting an extra hour of spring and summer daylight.
We didn’t go in at dark in those days, but it was hard to keep our baseball games going when we couldn’t see fast pitches or line drives coming at us. Bike riding after nightfall on dark, rutted gravel roads was hazardous.
On those balmy summer nights, we had to find things to do under the few streetlights where the small, dim bulbs had survived BB guns and slingshots or in the subdued glimmer of lights on front porches where our parents listened to radios and played Rook.
Regina and I have squeezed every second of sunlight out of longer spring and summer daytime hours during our years together, so it surprises me some that she dislikes Daylight Saving Time.
We have fished for bream and bass on area lakes and ponds until baits faded into darkness as soon as they were cast. We had to hear the splash of a largemouth or feel the tug of a bluegill to know when to pull them in.
Countless tennis matches on unlighted courts have ended when even the longer hours of sunshine waned and we could no longer see incoming serves or overhead smashes.
I will forever cherish those extended daylight hours for longer walks on the beach, barge rides past sunset, late day fish fries on the patio, more fun and games with grandkids and all the other gifts of just one extra hour of sunshine.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES