THIS DAY IN 1918 IN THERECORD

Saturday, March 30, 1918. For the first time in U.S. history, daylight savings time takes effect tonight at 2 a.m., but the city of Troy decides to make a public occasion out of moving its clocks forward ahead of schedule.

Mayor Cornelius F. Burns personally supervises the adjustment of the City Hall clock at 9 p.m., accompanied by “a jeweler well acquainted with the workings of clocks, one or two other city officials and newspapermen.”

One of the newspapermen is a reporter for the Sunday Budget. He reports that the party “climbed the long stairways and, by the light of one lantern found their way through the dark garret of the city hall, stooping under girders and stepping over braces, until at last the mechanism that regulates the clock a few feet above was found.

“Then precisely at 9 o’clock, while the fire alarm bell struck eight times, Mayor Burns turned a little wheel that set the hands of the clock ahead one hour. It took about a minute to complete the act.”

Daylight savings time is a wartime energy-saving measure. Allowing businesses to operate an extra hour without artificial light, the new regulation “will serve as another force in winning the war,” the Budget patriotically predicts.

As the mayor moves the clock hand, “school children below, as well as the hundreds gathered about the municipal building, were sing- ing ‘ The Star Spangled Banner.’” Students from Schools 3, 10 and 14 participate in the ceremony.

An Easter Sorrow

As part of the daylight-savings program, moving pictures are projected on the face of the City Hall clock as a band below plays an overture to “Tangled Time.”

As the band plays, Detective Bernard Farrell brings an accused shoplifter and her son into police headquarters. He took them into custody after complaints from shops on King and River Streets.

The unnamed 25 year old Watervliet woman has four additional children. She tells Farrell, “I had no money and wanted many things, the shoes badly.” Her own footwear “were undoubtedly shoes once but they looked more like the outcasts of the trade of long, long ago.” Her husband works, but “every cent he earns” goes toward the “high cost of living.”

Mother and son are sent home after the shopkeepers decline to press charges.

“Many are no doubt making a good thing out of the war, and have more money than they had before the great tragedy began to be profitable,” the Budget reports, “but there are others, and this poor woman is one, who have less, much less, because the outgo from their homes is far greater than the income.”