I've always been undecided as to which was more stupid: Daylight Savings Time itself, or the rabid opposition to it when Nixon made it year-round in 1974.
As for DST itself, I just think it's dopey and disruptive. Energy costs alone should be enough to persuade consumers and businesses to operate along whatever schedule is most advantageous for them. In my case, for example, I usually put clothes in the (electric) dryer right before I go to bed because the rates are dramatically lower at night.
I also use infrared heaters at night to heat only the occupied bedroom(s), and turn the propane house heat down to 58 or so. The electric is so cheap at night that the heaters barely make a dent in my bill, and I save on the more expensive propane.
So to me, Daylight Savings Time was just an early example of Big Brother deciding that the people were too stupid to act in their own interests. It was vastly unpopular with the people when it was introduced, and has a long history of repeals, reinstatements, revisions, and emergency orders surrounding it, all of them idiotic, in my opinion. You can't change time, the fourth dimension, by legislative fiat.
On the other hand, the protests from teachers, parents, and school administrators to year-round DST in 1974 were just as idiotic. The big complaint was that it forced children to walk to school -- children were actually able to walk on their own back then, without a hovering parent to make sure they didn't step on a crack -- while it was still dark. All sorts of angry vitriol was directed at Nixon for "endangering the welfare of children."
I was a child (well, an adolescent, actually) who walked to school back then, with several younger siblings and their friends in tow, and I certainly didn't feel endangered. I wasn't afraid of the dark. And although I thought DST was dopey, neither could I understand why all the concern over it. The darker mornings were offset by brighter afternoons, so it was a wash as far as I was concerned.
Another thing that made me think the protests were dopey was that in the morning, most kids went directly to school. But in the afternoons, most kids hung around the schoolyard or stopped at a playground and played before going home, so it actually made some sort of sense to shift the daylight to the afternoon, when kids were playing outside, rather than the morning, when we were simply moping along to school.
By way of explanation for the younger folks on POA, "playing outside" was something that children used to be allowed to do with our friends back before helicopter parenting became the norm. It usually involved dangerous, now-illegal things like running, jumping, climbing, falling, and even having physical contact. Really! There were games like tag, ringolivio, and johnny on the pony where physical contact was actually part of the game.
Parental supervision of these activities was pretty much unheard of (and certainly unwanted), as were lawsuits or suspensions resulting from the inevitable bumps, bruises, scrapes, and occasional fistfights that ensued. All of those things were shrugged off as being part of childhood. Seriously, they were!
Anyway, back to DST, the thing that most baffled me was why all of these highly-educated teachers and school administrators who were ready to crucify Nixon over a one-hour time shift didn't simply shift there own school schedules back by one hour to compensate. If they were that afraid of morning darkness, then simply start school an hour later. Problem solved.
-Rich
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