I had no idea that changing the clocks +/- an hour caused so much physical and emotional upset to so many people. But, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
The talk I remember about keeping the same time year 'round was dismissed because then there would be kids walking to school in the dark. I presume they were thinking of keeping the summer hours year round. Could keep the winter hours, but then as I said, I'd miss the extra hour of sunlight in the summer.
Might as well tell an interesting story since I have the chance. I went to graduate school at Ohio University in Athens Ohio. OU is a school of about 20000 students and Athens is a city with a population roughly the same. Curiously, the local government and especially the local police have a major distaste for the students, which seems a little stupid considering that the city literally would not exist without the university. OU was founded just a few years after the US revolutionary war when there was no State of Ohio but instead a much larger Ohio Country. The university was build in the wilderness. The City grew around it later.
Anyway, like any college towns, there are a bunch of bars in Athens. Local law says that no alcohol can be served after 2 am ("last call!!"), and all bars must be cleared of customers by 3 am. Clever readers already know where I'm going with this: in the spring when we change the clocks forward one hour, we do it at 2 am Sunday morning. Although it was never a problem in previous years, at 2 am on the morning of April 6th, 1997 it suddenly became 3 am and all of the bars in Athens turned on the bright lights, open the front doors, and kicked everybody out into the street.
The result was that the streets where full of drunken bar patrons (mostly students) that where not quite prepared to go home. They were surprised to be out in the street and were mostly just standing around trying to decide what to do next. Then something interesting happened to get their attention. The Athens Police showed up in full riot gear. Just as suddenly as they were out on the street, the drunken students had something interesting to watch. Why would they go home now?
The police in riot gear tried to forcibly get the students to leave by forming a line and marching down the street. Of course there were WAY more students than police, so that didn't work. They did resort to using "knee knockers" which are marshmallow sized hunks of wood fired from a hand held cannon at a low angle. The projectiles bounce off the ground and strike the rioters in the knees causing them to go home. At least that was the plan. Eventually, the students did get bored or hungry and left. And the event was labeled a riot in newspapers across the state. Evidently, one garbage can did get set on fire, but otherwise every act of violence came from the police department that night.
Although I was a graduate student at OU then, I was not "uptown" at the time. I did hear plenty of stories later and from what I can tell, the students remained remarkably cool, especially for a bunch of drunk kids being actively provoked by police. Sadly, cell phones with cameras were not a thing then or YouTube would have plenty of evidence of the event. There was a VHS tape around for a while, but it was very low quality.
So I suppose daylight savings time can be a dangerous thing.
Next time, I'll tell the story of the yearly Halloween party in Athens and how the mayor took out full page ads in all of the major newspapers in Ohio asking everyone to please not go Athens on Saturday that weekend. You can guess how successful that was at keeping people away.
