REMEMBER TO GET THAT LOST HOUR BACK

There's a grass-roots movement to eliminate Daylight Savings Time, Internet -- http://www.standardtime.com/.

Some time late tonight, or early Sunday, David Hutson will stop time for an hour in downtown Cape Girardeau.

"We'll literally stop the downtown clock," said Hutson, president of the Cape Girardeau Downtown Merchants Association.

It's the annual "fall back" change that will occur officially at 2 a.m. Sunday.

Americans will gain back the hour they lost last spring when they set their clocks back this weekend.

Daylight-savings time is nearing an end for 1998, and hundreds of millions of people will have to turn their clocks and watches back an hour to catch up with Central Standard Time.

It's not quite that simple for the downtown clock, located at the intersection of Main and Themes. Setting the clock is a simple matter, but it entails opening a locked door near the base and "switching" the clock off for one hour." During the spring, the clock has to be set at a faster pace, speeding the hands up until they hit the correct time.

The downtown clock has been reset a total of 23 times since it was installed in 1986.

If you think that is complicated, consider the plight of the "Watch Man" in Laughlin, Nev., 90 miles south of Las Vegas, a store which has more than 20,000 watches on display at the Riverside Resort Hotel & Casino, on the banks of the Colorado River, with each timepiece set to the correct time..

Thirty employees will spend much of the night changing the time on every watch and clock.

Do the customers really care about correct times on the watches?

The owners respond, "would you buy a watch if it's on the wrong time?." The store, on a good day, will sell 1,000 watches.

The Missouri State Fire Marshal's offices reminds Missourians to make another change at the same time -- changing the batteries in smoke alarms.

Many homes have fire alarms, says William Farr, state fire marshal. But alarms with dead batteries are useless, he says.

Farr's office has joined forces with the International Association of Fire Chiefs, local fire departments, and Energizer Batteries, in the 11th annual "Change Your Clock, Change Your Battery" campaign, urging citizens to adopt the simple lifesaving habit.

Meanwhile, there's a grass-roots movement to eliminate Daylight Savings Time, via Internet -- http://www.standardtime.com/.

Organizers of the Standard Time movement say its's absurd to switch times twice a year.

Maybe DST made sense before electric lights were so common, or during the World War II era, say standard time supporters, but, it doesn't make sense now on the eve of the third millennium.

Most people signing in on the Internet campaign want time one of two ways -- Year round Daylight times, or year round Standard Time.

There was a time in history when people had to keep watch on more than the clock on time switches. During the mid-1960s, only 15 states observed daylight-savings time. An interstate traveler could be an hour early, or an hour late.

The Southeast Missouri-Southern Illinois area was a good example of the confusion more than three decades ago when Illinois observed daylight-saving time while Missouri favored standard time, and crossing the Mississippi River could put a person behind, or ahead, before Missouri adopted the daylight-savings time in the late 1960s.

All the confusion finally caught the attention of Congress, and bills were introduced in 1967 requiring states using daylight time to make the changeover on the last Sunday in April and October. States maintained the option of daylight-savings time but by 1969, only three states -- Michigan, Hawaii, and Arizona -- weren't observing it.

In 1986, President Reagan signed a bill, effective in 1987, that moved the start of daylight time to the first Sunday in April, with standard time starting the final Sunday in October.

Daylight-saving time was first practiced in the United States in 1918, when Congress adopted it as a part of the World War I effort to save energy. Six months later, daylight-savings time was scrapped.

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

During the years of the big energy crises in the mid-1970s, the United States observed daylight-savings time from January through October in 1974. The United States returned to the seven-month daylight-saving observance -- April through October -- in 1976.

The idea of daylight-saving time dates back to Benjamin Franklin, in 1784. Franklin proposed daylight-savings time when he was U.S. minister to France.

Franklin calculated that Parisians needlessly burned candles for 1,281 hours during the spring and summer and could save if they would accept the daylight-saving program.

Paris laughed him down.

The idea resurfaced in 1907, when Englishman William Willett introduced bills in the House of Commons calling for turning the clocks ahead in summer months. His bills died in committee.

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.