Coping with D.S.T. Lag

In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candlelight. In summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day. --Robert Louis Stevenson

That simple plaint was shared by millions of Americans last week. It was the first week of year-round Daylight Saving Time, and millions of people set their clocks ahead an hour only to find themselves getting up in what did indeed seem like the middle of the night.

For many, it was a disconcerting experience. In McCandless, Pa., four-year-old Heather Campbell, awakened in the morning by her mother, asked: "Why are we going to bed so late?" At the Chicago Zoological Park in Brookfield, keepers had to wake up the wolves for their Sunday dinner of horsemeat and ground turkey. In Puerto Rico, which stayed on standard time, hundreds of tourists missed their scheduled planes to the mainland because the airlines had adopted the new time schedule, and they had to be flown home aboard special flights. At the Bank of America headquarters in San Francisco, bleary-eyed employees complained that they were suffering from "D.S.T. lag."

The reaction among farmers was exemplified in a cartoon by E.A. Harris, which showed a startled rooster rather lamely explaining to a quizzical hen"Nobody told me about Daylight Saving!" Attendance at some churches in New York City was off. Explained the Rev. Frank Walinski of St. Peter's Lutheran Church: "If you want a personal opinion, it's hard as hell to get up in the morning." In Baltimore, most of the prominently placed public clocks were not turned ahead immediately; because their lights had been turned off to conserve energy, the clocks were unreadable in the morning darkness anyway.

Many parents feared for their children's safety because the time change meant that most had to go to school in the dark. In Philadelphia, an angry mother rose at a neighborhood school-board meeting to shout: "It's dangerous for our kids to go to school through pitch-black streets full of abandoned buildings. Mothers, stop dragging your feet. Open schools later in the day or our children are going to get hurt!"

Energy Savings. Indeed, school and police authorities blamed the darkness, in part, for a number of motor-vehicle accidents involving children, including a 16-year-old boy in suburban Chicago, run over en route to school. Californians were chilled by the brutal rape of a 16-year-old girl in Cupertino, who was attacked as she crossed a vacant lot on her way to school. Most schools found it impossible to adjust their hours because of union contract rules, the after-school commitments of school bus drivers and inconvenience to working parents. Thus, many school authorities recommended that children wear light-colored clothing or reflector patches. The Connecticut General Life Insurance Co. began giving away patches and distributed 500,000 in two days. In Fairfax County, Va., guards used highway flares to guide children across streets. Elsewhere, children lit their way to school with flashlights, lanterns and even candles.

It remains to be seen whether the switch will pay off. At congressional hearings, some experts had estimated that year-round D.S.T. (the present law mandates it to April 30, 1975) might save as much as 2% of the energy, particularly electricity, consumed daily in the U.S. A Department of Transportation official estimated that the time change could mean fewer traffic accidents. He explained that accidents in the evening are often caused by the fact that at that time many drivers' reactions are slowed--some are tired out from the day's labor, others have had too many after-work cocktails. Driving home in daylight should help compensate for those factors. Indeed, motor-vehicle fatalities and serious accidents dropped 3.8% in Britain when that country was on year-round D.S.T. from October 1968 through October 1971. Some law-enforcement experts had suggested that the change might cut violent crimes, since they also peak in the evening. That was not the case in New York City, however. One police official discerned no change in crime patterns and concluded that criminals, like most other citizens, had quickly adjusted to the new time schedule.

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