COMMENTARY: Clocks: The dread of daylight savings time

Springing forward or falling back, daylight saving time was something my father always dreaded.

Having to reset all the clocks in his house behind or ahead by an hour twice a year meant he had a lot of work to do — and he didn’t enjoy doing it. The chief cause of his pain was my mother. She loved clocks so much she had 14 scattered all over their house. There were clocks in my parents’ bedroom, the laundry room, two guest rooms, the car and on the back patio.

Changing each of those clocks was an annoying and time-consuming task for my dad.

It didn’t take him too long to figure out how to change the microwave’s clock, but the stove was new, and its clock always caused him great grief.

“For gods sakes, Betty,” he would complain to my mother, “I’ll never figure this daggone thing out.” He particularly disliked the clock in the basement family room.

Everyone in our family thought this framed “picture clock,” which displayed a mill on a river, was hideous. But my mother loved it because 40 years earlier I had used my meager high school savings to buy it for her as a birthday gift. My father especially hated it because to reset it, he had to use a stepladder.

“Why don’t you take it back?” he would often plead with me.

“I don’t want that ugly thing in my house,” I would reply.

The three clocks that troubled my dad the most all had chimes. One was a beautiful, handcrafted wall clock that my Uncle Jimmy had gotten for my parents in West Germany nearly half a century earlier.

On an antique table in the dining room sat another chime clock that Verizon — which we called “the phone company” — had given my father to mark his 25th year of working there. When he retired after nearly 40 years of service, Verizon gifted him another clock — a magnificent grandfather clock that sat in the living room. It also had chimes.

“For gods sakes, Betty, I’ll never get these three chimes to ring at the same time!” my dad would complain at the top of every hour — and at the top of his lungs! — for weeks after we sprang forward or fell back.

Daylight saving time, which aimed to squeeze an extra hour of daylight out of a typical summer day, didn’t become uniform across the United States until 1966. People loved it and people hated it. All I knew was that nobody despised its arrival more than my father. Just as he would finally get all his clocks reset and synchronized to chime in concert, it was time to spring forward or fall back again, which meant his misery started all over again.

He had but one thing to say to that torture: “For gods sakes, Betty, if I’d known these daggone chiming clocks would cause me so much grief, I would’ve asked the phone company for gold watches instead!”

My beloved father is gone now. We lost him two years ago, and now my mother is in the process of selling the family house and splitting up their things among us family members. My sisters and I will each be getting our share of the 14 clocks. I’ll get the grandfather clock my father always wanted me to have.

But the best news is nobody will ever have to worry about getting those chimes in sync again.

Email Tom Purcell at Tom@TomPurcell.com.