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It seems funny to me to hear people talking about daylight saving as if it was a new concept.
I was only just old enough to remember it first happening back in New Zealand, without never really knowing life without it. In fact, the option was in place there long before I was born - it just didn’t become a permanent fixture for a while.
Yes, it is a pain when you lose one hour of sleep (or other recreation) when you put the clocks forward, and that always brings a few grumbles.
But I don’t hear too many complaints when the clocks go back an hour, and we get an extra hour of rec time. And the extra daylight in the evenings during the summer is also very nice.
The New Zealand Summer Time Act of 1929 actually provided for “Daylight Time” to be observed from the second Sunday in October to the third Sunday in March of the following year - remember that the seasons in the southern hemisphere are the opposite to here!
The concept was dabbled with until the end of World War II, then apparently discarded.
In 1974, the idea was resurrected on a trial basis, and proved so popular that the government of the day decided to make it a permanent event, with a slight change in the period. It would now run from the last Sunday in October to the first Sunday of March.
I vaguely remember some farmers complaining that their cows wouldn’t know the clocks were being changed, and that the idea didn’t suit them at all. Back in those days, the dairy industry was a cornerstone of the New Zealand economy, so the farmers’ opinions usually carried some weight.
They lost this argument though, and in 1985, when the government surveyed New Zealanders on the subject, 76 percent wanted it either continued or expanded. As a result, in 1990, the period was extended to begin on the first Sunday in October, continuing to the third Sunday in March.
New Zealanders kind of have “a thing” with daylight. Schools there teach that New Zealand is the first country to see the sun each day (due to the International Date Line’s position.)
I’m not quite so vocal about that, as Fiji and some other small Pacific nations also get the morning sunrise at the same time as New Zealand does, and as I’m sure those Alaskans who can see Russia from their front porch will tell you, the eastern coastline of Russia is as close to the date line as New Zealand.
So really, it is an “honor” that is only shared, which, for me anyway, makes it a little less special. A tie for first still means there was someone’s rear-end I didn’t kick.
I like my first placings to be decisive!
It came as a real surprise when I moved to Ohio, and found that, for a part of the year at least, skipping over the county line to the west not only put me in a different state, but a different time zone.
In New Zealand of course, we only have one time zone, as it is such a small, and isolated country, so the concept of stepping into a different time zone while I was driving down the road was quite a novelty.
It became a pain when I was covering sports for the Bryan, Ohio newspaper. Several of our county schools, especially Edon and Edgerton, would cross the border to tangle with Hamilton and Fremont. It became a real pain trying to figure out whether to be there an hour later, and what time will I be back at the office to write the story.
Our deadline wasn’t until next morning, but our boss liked to have everything sorted by midnight so he could go home and get a good night’s sleep knowing he only really had to be in on time in the morning to make sure there were no actual printing problems.
Plus, as a part-timer, I was getting paid by the hour, and not a fixed salary. So was I missing an hour’s pay if I crossed the border, or claiming an hour too much?
It became practice for us to pretty much ignore games played in Indiana, unless the school involved sent us results, which was a shame as the cross-border rivalry could easily have made for a great story.
While I’m not normally an advocate of doing things just to fit in with everyone else, the observance of daylight saving does seem to be the sensible thing to do given that the neighboring states are also doing it.
I certainly enjoyed being able to go home form work Monday evening (a meeting free evening no less) and find there was enough natural daylight to enable me to paint some soldiers.
Now I just need the weather to get a bit warmer, and I might actually look forward to setting foot outside my cave in the evening.
by FRANK SHANLEY
frank@news-banner.com
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