Tempus Fugit

Central Standard Time returns to the Coulee Region Sunday morning, November 1, at 2AM. It used to be easy to remember when it was time to “fall back” an hour — it was the last Sunday in October. This all changed in 2007, when the Energy Policy Act of 2005 went into effect.

This act is part of a Department of Energy study about the energy savings that might result by staying on Daylight Saving Time longer. For the next several years, we’ll “fall back” an hour the first Sunday in November and “spring ahead” the second Sunday in March.

Of course, my mom in Tucson, Arizona, doesn’t have to worry about this — Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Saving Time (nor, for that matter, does Hawaii and the US territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa and the Virgin Islands along with some Native American lands).

While adjusting our clocks in the fall and spring seems like a ritual that’s existed since the American Revolution, it’s actually a rather recent innovation. Founding Father Benjamin Franklin proposed adjusting clocks to take advantage of longer summer daylight back in the 1700s, but a national policy of turning clocks ahead an hour in the spring was first adopted by Congress during World War I. This 1918 law was repealed the next year, and Daylight Saving Time was left to local jurisdictions.

A national Daylight Saving Time was observed again during World War II. Once the war ended, though, the practice once again went back to local jurisdictions.

This all changed in 1966 with the passage of the Uniform Time Act. This act standardized the starting and ending dates for Daylight Saving Time, but made provisions for individual states to remain on standard time if their legislatures voted to do this (as was the case in Arizona and Hawaii). A 1972 amendment to this act allowed areas bordering two time zones within individual states to remain on standard time (such as in North and South Dakota, which are split by the Central and Mountain Time Zones).

Things remained pretty quiet on the time change front until 1986, when the start date to spring ahead to Daylight Saving Time was changed from the last Sunday in April to the first Sunday in April.

While the history of time changes has changed with the times, the take home lesson is simple. Turn your clocks back an hour (fall back) either before you turn in this Saturday night or at 2AM Sunday morning (November 1), when we return to Central Standard Time in the region. You can rest easy until 2AM March 14, 2010 — when we “spring ahead” an hour back to Daylight Saving Time.