Turn your clocks back to Match Game time

What’s buried on Brad’s Desk…

So, how did you get through the start of Daylight Saving Time this week?  Losing an hour of sleep on Sunday, or forgetting to change the clocks can wreak havoc on a person, and I saw an example of that in a decades-old game show rerun.   

The Game Show Network has Match Game episodes at lunchtime.  They’re up to 1975, and besides Richard Dawson and Brett Somers, the panel on one episode this week included Gary Burghoff, alias Radar O’Reilly.  At the start of the show, host Gene Rayburn asked Gary why he missed the previous day’s episode, and Gary said he forgot Daylight Savings was starting.  Game shows that feature celebrity players often tape the shows on Sundays.  Ironic.  Radar from MASH would never forget to set clocks, but Gary the actor did, way back in ’75.  And considering the year, I can appreciate the mistake.  In 1975, the US started Daylight Saving Time in February, when normally it would have happened in late April.  But we were in the middle of a two-year experiment of year-round Daylight Savings, during the infamous energy crisis, when we thought later sunsets would save gasoline.  Trouble is, it was dangerous for kids going to school in the morning, in the dark of winter.  Public pressure forced Congress to give up the year-round practice, and we haven’t tried it again since. 

But we might be ready to give it another shot.  The US Senate has just approved all-year Daylight Savings, with the reason this time being that it messes up people’s internal clocks to switch back and forth twice a year.  Better to just have the later sunsets all year, and never change.    There are still a couple of steps to go before a year-round change becomes law.  But as they might say on Match Game, Congress is hoping that later sunlight will make you (BLANK).