FALL BACK POSITION

Not sure how it gets to be "that time of year" again--but here we are at the bi-annual event, the changing of the clocks. Whether we've saved an hour, or spent an hour, today is the day we all search the house for all available time pieces needing manual resetting, and call all relatives and friends we KNOW miss this function twice a year to tell them to reset their clocks.

The changing of the clocks always takes me back to the BIG discussion of whether or not Iowa was going on daylight savings time. I was quite young, but the significance of the debate was not lost on me--it was THE talk of the town.

Iowa being basically a rural setting, much of the discussion was farm-based. Many farmers were quite convinced the cows wouldn't know when to give milk, or the chickens to lay eggs. It was NOT considered a joke--it was serious business. And further, how would farmers be able to attend church if they had to be back home milking? It seemed the incongruity of running the farm via the "savings" clock rather than the "regular" clock, was going to be a rather daunting task.

There were documented cases printed in the local paper of terrible outcomes from neighboring states that had already opted for daylight savings time. When all the reports began mounting up, it was enough to curl your hair.

And then there was the "pro" side of the discussion. We would be raking in the harvest of all that saved time. Hours of our lives would have immense opportunities for improvement, hours that would be otherwise lost to us, would be "saved", and summer would become a virtual paradise with all these added hours in our day. As a child, I was rather awed at these speculations. According to these reports coming in from happy partakers in other states, it seemed rather incredulous that anyone would not take advantage of this time-saving device.

Eventually it was voted on. Daylight savings time was adopted state-wide. After the fact, I don't remember hearing any reports of curdled milk, dehydrated cows, or eggs hatching before their time. But there were untold ruffled feathers across the state!

I think the only thing that out-stripped the daylight savings crisis, was the debate on "to fluoride or not to fluoride" the water supply. But that, as they say, is another story.