DAYLIGHT TIME ENDS TONIGHT

Sometime this evening, Charles L. Hutson, president of Hutson Furniture Co. in downtown Cape Girardeau, will reset the downtown clock at the intersection of Themis and Main.

Daylight-saving time is nearing an end for 1995, and most Americans will set their clocks back this weekend to gain back the hour they lost last spring.

It is the annual "fall back" change that will occur officially at 2 a.m. Sunday. But most people will change the clocks before going to bed tonight.

The change this weekend back to "slow time" ends the seven-month period of "fast time" that provided an extra hour of daylight in the evening. Sunday's change will return the hour of sleep lost in April.

After the time change occurs Sunday, the most noticeable effect will be in the evenings: The sun will set at around 5 o'clock instead of 6, and it will be dark by 6 instead of 7.

The official sunset Sunday will be at 5:04 p.m., representing 10 hours and 45 minutes of daylight during the day. The daylight time will dwindle a minute on Monday, with sunset at 5:03.

The period of daylight will continue to get shorter over the next 52 days until Dec. 21, when only 9 1/2 hours of daylight will be present.

The national adherence to daylight-saving time has evolved from the early 1960s, when only 15 states observed it.

The Southeast Missouri-Southern Illinois area was a good example of the confusion that resulted. Illinois observed daylight-saving time while Missouri was on standard time. Crossing the Mississippi River here could put a person behind or ahead before Missouri adopted daylight-saving time in the late 1960s.

Congress passed a law in 1967 requiring states using daylight time to make the changeover on the last Sundays in April and October. States maintained the option of daylight-saving time, but by 1969 47 states were observing it.

In 1987, the start of daylight-saving time was moved to the first Sunday in April, with standard time starting the final Sunday in October.

Daylight-saving time was first introduced in the United States in 1918, when Congress adopted it as an effort to save energy during World War I. Six months later daylight-saving time was scrapped.

In 1942, Congress put the nation on "War Time," which called for setting clocks ahead one hour. Following World War II, Congress repealed War Time, but a half-dozen states maintained the daylight-saving time.

Each year as time to adjust the clocks comes around, fire chiefs throughout the area suggest that people change the batteries in their smoke detectors.

Local fire chiefs, the International Association of Fire Chiefs, and the American Burn Association point out that nearly 80 percent of all American homes now have smoke detectors, but as many as half of them are inoperative because of dead batteries.

Fire officials say the weekend switch from daylight to standard time is the perfect time to install new batteries in home smoke detectors, and to make sure flashlight batteries are fully charged in the event of an emergency.