VALLEY OF DEATH Chapter Three

I can imagine the unease felt by the technicians at Power House Number One (above), three miles below the St. Francis dam. It was the generators in this building, fed by the fall of water from the reservoir  which was providing the first dependable electricity to the city of Los Angeles. The needles on their gauges indicated the water level in the reservoir had been slowly dropping for hours. 

And the night shift workers who had driven around the the reservoir and over the dam in getting to work had observed a foot drop in the road along the eastern abutment of the dam (above, right). When Ace Hopewell reported for work a few minutes later he reported hearing what he thought was a landslide somewhere in the dark near the reservoir. 

Finally, about 11:57 P.M., somebody got worried enough to pick up the phone and call the dam keeper in the smaller Power House Number Two - containing just 2 generators -  a mile and a half further below the dam. Was everything okay there? “Yes”, came the quick answer.  But the haste of the response belied its assurance. 

And fifteen seconds later, at 12:57:30, Monday, 12  March, 1928, every light in Los Angeles went out. At that instant 53 million tons of water (12 billion U.S. gallons) wrenched apart the St. Francis Dam, had released a 10 story wall of black water desperate to reach the Pacific Ocean, fifty miles away.

In August of 1924 (two months after the first bombing of the Los Angeles Aqueduct) William Mulholland began construction of a new dam at the narrowest point (above) in Francisquito (Fran-sis-kito) canyon - 50 miles north of Los Angeles.  But Mulholand consulted no geologist. in picking the site.  

Originally the unreinforced concrete gravity arch dam - held in place by its own weight -  was to be 600 across at the top and 185 feet high.  But as  bombings continued to disrupt the flow of water from the Aqueduct,  Mulholland decided to add ten feet in height, increasing the storage capacity of the future reservoir by 2,000 acre feet.  But the old man never made an attempt to widen the base. 

What  haunted Mulholland was the ease with which the angry citizens of Owens County could cut off the drinking water to the city of Los Angles. And this reservoir was the final piece in a series of dams and reservoirs which would give Los Angeles a year’s supply of water beyond the easy reach of the Dynamite Gang in the Owens Valley.

Baily Haskell was one of the construction workers and decades later he noted to a local newspaper that in their rush to finish this final addition to the aqueduct system, Muholland’s mangers were using gravel directly from the bed of Francisquito creek “They didn't use washed gravel”, he said. “I could see these great chunks of clay going right into the dam.”

A year later, as negotiations with the Watterson Brothers in the Owens Valley stalled, Mulholland increased the height of the dam by another ten feet, to 205 feet high. This increased the 3 mile long and ½ mile wide reservoir to 38,000 acre feet. But no strengthening was made to the base of the dam. On March 1, 1926 water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct began to fill the canyon above the dam.

As the great Cecilla Rasmussen, writer for the Los Angeles Times, pointed out in a February 2003 column, “From the day the St. Francis Dam opened in 1926, it leaked. The folks in the farm towns downstream used to joke that they'd see you later ‘if the dam don’t break’.” On March 7, 1928 the intakes were closed. The reservoir was now full and the water was a mere three inches from the top of the dam.

That week drivers along the east shore road above the reservoir complained that the road was sagging near the dam’s eastern abutment.  At every step in the filling of the reservoir Mulholland personally checked the dam and declared it safe -  the last time between 10:30 and 12:30 on 11 March, 1928. Again, and for the final time, Mulholland declared the dam safe.

Less than 12 hours later it collapsed.It was not a landslide that destroyed the dam. That did not occur until after the 250,000 ton concrete structure had been wrenched apart like a child’s toy by the weight of the water that had soaked into its porous concrete.

I still have a three pound chunk of the dam sitting in my living room, and what stands out to me are the large miscellaneously shaped rocks peppered throughout the concrete, and the rough and uneven feel of it in your hand.

As the dam was twisted apart a wall of black water 140 feet high burst forth and began to scour the walls of Francisquito canyon. 

The first to die was Tony Harnischfeger (above) , the watchman, who was probably inspecting the dam he was so nervous about. Tony’s body was never found. The corpse of his girlfriend, Leona Johnson (above, right), who shared his cabin a quarter mile below the dam, was found wedged between two pieces of concrete. The body of their six year old son, Coder (above, center), was found further down stream. The copse of the youngest child, in Tony's arms, was never found.

Lillian Curtis (above, right) was startled awake in her cabin near the  Power House Number Two (above) by something.  She remembered “a haze over everything”, as her “big, husky cowboy” of a husband, Lyman (above, left) , lifted Lillian and their three year old son Danny out their bedroom window.

Lyman told her to run up the hill next to the Penstock water pipes (above)  while he went back for their two daughters, Marjorie and Mazie.  Panic drove Lillian up the almost vertical slope in the dark, along with the family dog, Spot. Then...

...just moments after the initial dam collapse (now 12:02 a.m. Tuesday March 13th ) a wall of water pounded the Concret Power House to pieces, and swept the cabins and the seventy other employees and their families into oblivion.

Waist deep water pulled at her but Lillian was just able to reach the safety at the top of the ridge. Lillian and her son, and another employee, Ray Rising, were the only survivors of the seventy.

Ray had to fight to get out of his own cabin. “The water was so high we couldn't get out the front door... In the darkness I became tangled in an oak tree, fought clear and swam to the surface... I grabbed the roof of another house, jumping off when it floated to the hillside... There was no moon and it was overcast with an eerie fog - very cold.”  Where once a small village had sat, was now scraped as bare as a table top (above).  Ray lost his wife and three daughters to the flood.

Just downstream the waters engulfed the Ruiz farm (above) . Dead in an instant were wife and mother Rosaria, father Enrique and their four children, one an adult. The farmhouse and barn were wiped out as if they had never existed.

Next the tidal wave swept across the ranch and a trading post store owned by silent film star Harry Carey, before sweeping across Castaic road junction (above) where...

...a 20 foot high wave destroyed the encampment of 150 California Edison employees, killing 84 of them. The victims did not drown. They were found, mostly, caught in trees, stripped of their cloths, “battered and bruised, but didn’t show any anguish – so probably they were taken in their sleep.”

By one in the morning the reservoir was empty. “An entire lake had disappeared” in less than an hour. But the flood was just getting started. At about 1:20 a.m. the warning finally began to go out to the little farming towns ahead of the flood.

Topography squeezed the wave back to 40 feet high as it swept down the stream bed of the Santa Clarita River, plowing through orchards and farms and homes from Piru to Fillmore and through Santa Paula. It reached the ocean in Ventura just before dawn, a wave a quarter of a mile wide and “50% water, 25% mud, and 25% miscellaneous trash” according to one witness.

Along the way it had demolished at least 1,200 houses...

..and smashed 10 bridges. 

The dead, many sucked out of their beds in their sleep,  would be washing up for days as far south as San Diego and Mexico. 

The inability to build a head end reservoir had now produced dried out orchards in the Owens Valley and drowned trees in Southern California. The last known victim of the flood, although unidentified,  would be uncovered in the city of Newhall, in 1992.

How many were carried out to sea or remain buried in mud closer to home will never be known, but it seems unlikely to me that the toll of the dead could be merely the 450 officially claimed.

I would estimate it could not be much fewer than 1,000 lives, counting migratory workers and unemployed living in the fields and orchards along the river.

Mulholland began by inspecting the disaster site (above) the next morning, insisting the failure must be more work by the Owens Valley dynamiters. But the evidence and the official rush to close the matter boxed him in, until he said he “envied those who were killed.”

The corner’s jury was convened within the week, and issued its report 12 days after the disaster. 

It recommended that “…the construction and operation of a great dam should never be left to the sole judgment of one man, no matter how eminent.. .... for no one is free from error.” 

The St. Francis dam, it added, had been constructed on the site of an ancient landslide. And for seventy years that was the accepted version.

But in the late 1990’s Professor of geological engineering J. David Rogers, of Missouri University of Science & Technology reached a different conclusion. “Probably the greatest single factor", he wrote, "was the decision to heighten the dam a second time."

"Had the dam not been heightened that last 10 feet, it might have survived.” But the ultimate failure, alleged Professor Rogers, was the concrete. So rushed was the construction that it was never allowed to properly cure, and never prepared as carefully as it should have been."

 “If it had been of better quality, it (the dam) would have never fallen apart as it did. It was so filled with fractures.” The disaster’s cost was later estimated at $13 million ($156 million in 2007).

The last remaining piece of the St. Francis dam would remaining standing to this day, and residents came to call it, The Tomb Stone.

A year after the disaster William Mulholland resigned and, in the words of his grand-daughter became a “…stooped and silent” recluse.

His onetime friend, Frank Eaton, died on 12 March, 1934 at the age of 78. His grandson described his last years as bitter. “…he felt he'd been made the goat for all the troubles that came to ail the Owens Valley, and because he felt he never got the proper credit for his role in the creation of the aqueduct.”Just over a year later that other dreamer, William Mulholland, passed into the valley of death at his home, on 22 July, 1935. And the Long Valley reservoir, was finally opened in 1941, and was named after a Catholic priest who had fought for peace between the DWP and Owens Valley residents; Crowley Lake

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TOMBSTONES Chapter Thirteen

I know what 21 year old John Pleasant Gray was thinking on the evening of Saturday, 13 August, 1881, when he first saw the bloody man staggering through the yellow tabosa grasses. He was frightened, fearing an Apache raiding party must have ambushed the workmen who had spent a month building the adobe cabin he had slept in for the first time last night. The laborers had left the day before, escorted by the ranch hands, leaving only himself and the cook in their isolated outpost 15 miles north of the Mexican border. And in the clear air of the New Mexico dusk, John could see the dark brown blood caked on the man's lower face, as he stumbled across the distance between them.

Raised in civilized Sacramento, California, and the Sonora, Mexico port of Guyamas, John Gray had never seen the Animus mountains before the spring of 1881. He could not know that Apaches could rarely afford attacking large parties of whites. John had never seen the Sonoran Desert before 1880, when after graduating college he joined his family in Tombstone, Arizona.

John's father, 56 year old (in 1881) "Colonel" Mike Lee had lived in Tombstone  almost since before it was a town - 1879. He had lived there long enough to be sued by Ed Schefflin for stealing ore from The Good Enough claim. But Mike had served in the California Legislature, and hired expensive Sacramento lawyers, who counter sued Ed - and won. The title of "Colonel" was purely ornimental. Mike Lee had been born in Tennesse and raised in Texas, and moved to California in 1849, but he never served in the milia in any of those places. 

In Tombstone(above) Mike Gray owned a boarding house, was secretary to the town council, and served as a Justice of the Peace, where he acquired the title of "Judge".  As such Judge Gray spent his time arrainging alledged drunks, petty thieves and killers, and assessing taxes. He was a "mover and a shaker" in Tombstone, well known as "selfish and dishonest" and "a slippery character". That spring of 1880,   looking to give his returning son John Pleasant a good start in life. Judge Gray paid the infamous Curley Bill Brocius $300 sight unseen for 300,000 acres of land on the slopes of the Animus Mountains, in New Mexico. And he sent John and his 18 year old son Richard "Dixie Dick" Lee Gray, to manage the palce, although neither of them had any more expericence at ranching than did Judge Colonel Mike Gray himself.

Curly Bill Brocius (above) did not actually own paper to the land in the Animus mountains. He claimed a homestead there. 

Brocius and he and his partner, Robert E. "Dutch"  Martin (above),  often grazed cattle there, which they had rustled in Sonora Mexico, and driven across the border through Guadalupe canyon, about 20 miles south of Martin's ranch around a New Mexico the spring called Cloverdale.  In Sonora 'Dutch' Martin was known as a thief and a murder, responsible for killing a dozen Mexican citizens a year.  But in Cloverdale Robert Martin was a respected businessman, with a wife and child.

Just about the time John Pleasant Gray was graduating from the University of California, businessman Dutch Martin had been murdered - shot in the head from ambush by rustlers who had lately taken to rustling the largest rustler's cattle.  'Dutch' Martin was 45 years old when he died, and William "Curley Bill" Brocius (above) was nearly 40 himself. Where the freckled faced "Curley Bill" had once been, ".. able to hit running jackrabbits, shoot out candle flames...and ...quarters from between the fingers of "volunteers, " the middle aged alcoholic Curley Bill's world was beginning to blur at the edges, like Wild Bill Hickock's before him. Hickok had died at 39, so Brocius the gunman was living on borrowed time. Time to change careers. And time to replace Dutch Martin in the Rustlers Trail.

The trail began between the western foot of the Dragoon Mountains and eastern rampart of the Mule Mountains, centered upon the San Pedro River (above, left). There, cattle were fattened on the feed lots of the Clanton and McLaury ranches before being slaughtered to feed the hungry miners in Tombstone and its mill town outliers of Charleston, Contention, Fairbank and Millville. The cows had arrived in this promised land from the east, by crossing the Dragoons through South Pass, and enduring the water-less desert of the Sulfur Springs Valley. The drovers had prepared the cows for this endeavor by fattening and watering them on the slopes of the 6,000 foot high Chihuahua Mountains (above, right), at way stations like the Horse Shoe Valley 7-Up ranch , whose owner of record was a San Francisco barkeep named "Buckskin" Frank Leslie - recruited by Curley Bill.

The Chiricahua mountain ranches were a rest stop after the herds had traversed the north-south San Simon Valley, which they had crossed after resting on the slopes of the Pedrogosa or Peloncillo Mountains, transited by the easy, well watered Skeleton Canyon on the Arizona-New Mexico border (above). 

Between the western mouth of Skeleton Canyon, it had been an easy drive across the San Bernadino Valley from the Animus Mountains, where the new Gray Ranch (above) was to provide ample grass and water, just 15 miles north of the beginning of the trail - the American side of the the winding, deadly pass through the Guadalupe Mountains.

The man who finally staggered into the Gray ranch that Saturday evening had spent the day traversing an arm of the San Bernadino Valley, on foot. He was exhausted, sunburned, dehydrated, and incoherent. It was some time before he could even identify himself. But when John Gray learned the man was not one of the construction workers, but a Cow Boy named Harry Ernshaw he panicked. Ernshaw had been in the rustler party with as his 19 year old brother.  "Dixie Lee "Gray had been gone south of the border to learn the rustler art under the tutelage of Old Man Clanton himself. As quickly as he could, John saddled a horse and went for help. He rode 20 miles east, to the slopes of the highest peak of the Animus mountains, Mount Gillespie. Here, he knew was a "Cow Boy" camp.

John Gray would dramatically described the  twisting canyon ride on dawn Sunday 14 August 1881, and the growing dread he felt approaching the grassy clearing where he had been told his brother's body lay. 

"Out of the clear sky," John recalled, "a black speck appears and soon other black specks ... Soon they are high overhead, beginning to circle slowly...circling round and round - and you know that somewhere within that circle on the earth below lies a corpse..." When the canyon walls fell away, John remembered the top of every tree in the clearing supported at least one of those "fiendish looking" birds. Sixty years later he said he thought of every buzzard as, "the worlds most vigilant undertaker."

The image of the 4 bodies was burned into his mind. "All were perfectly nude...Billy Lang...Jim Crane...Old Man Clanton...and my brother Dick, just turned nineteen....We found the dead body of Charlie Snow...about a half-mile from the camp. The other cowboy, Billy Byers, we found alive some five miles away. He was shot through the front of the abdomen and the ball had gone clear through his body..."  Byers was "completely out of his head", but he would recover.

John recalled, "We took our dead back to the ranch." There they ripped up the cabin's flooring to make coffins. "We buried the four bodies in a little square plot on the top of the nearby knoll."

Before its first stolen herd had even reached the new oasis, the Gray Ranch had turned to dust in the mouths of its new owners. In his 1940 memoir "All Roads Led To Tombstone", John Pleasant Gray sanitized the events of that summer, as people are wont to do with time. He remembered, "My father and I felt conditions were too hard at the time to fight against."  He did not mention that the naked scavaged corpse of his 19 year old brother had represented the inflated cost of stolen Sonoran cattle. But Judge Gray had $300 invested in the property, and John Gray remembered his father insisted they hold onto the property. "I made a trip out from Tombstone every month," he remembered, "to sleep one night at the ranch in order to comply with the preemption law." And to visit his brother's grave. In closing that early episode in his long life he added that after the Guadalupe Canyon Massacare, "Even the rustlers kept out of the valley for fear of meeting the Mexicans."

A few years later, Judge Gray sold the rustler's oasis to the George Hearst, father of William Randolph Hearst, for $12,000. So in the end I guess it proved worth the life of Judge Gray's youngest son. But John Gray never said so.

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TOMBSTONES Chapter Twelve

I know what Tombstone (above) City Marshal Ben Sippy was feeling when he took his leave of absence on 6 June, 1881. He was feeling trapped. Which would be odd only if humans were one dimensional heroes and villains. In the flesh Ben was a hell of a lawman. Just after his election in January of 1881, Marshal Sippy faced down a mob of Cow Boys who wanted to string up the young hot headed gambler Micheal "Mike" "Johnny Behind the Deuce" O'Rouke. The Earps, Virgil, Wyatt and Morgan stood behind him, as well as Bat Masterson. Not a bad supporting cast. Never the less it was Ben Sippy who ran the risk of being shot first, and he did not waver. He should have been famous as a cold eyed, steel nerved western lawman, you might say a real life Wyatt Earp. Instead he became an historical footnote, because of the malaria that seemed to hang over him. Ben Sippy couldn't seem to handle money.

Ben had been chosen to finish out Fred White's term as Town Marshal by The Tombstone Epitath, and its editor John Clum. And the January election that saw Clum elected mayor, also saw Ben Sippy elected Marshal in his own right. But almost immediately the relationship between the Town Marshal and town turned sour. It was a repeat of Ben's experiences in Weatherford, Texas, just west of Fort Worth. Under his tenure as law officer and tax collector in both towns, money started to evaporate. And his bills started to pile up, unpaid. It wasn't that Ben was openly crooked, like Cochise County Marshal Johnny Behan and his "10% grafters" would prove to be. It seems that Ben just could not handle money, his own or other people's. The constant need to plug his financial dikes seems to have distracted him, as if he was financing an addiction - but whether it was an opium den, or laudlem, one particular woman, women in general or just whiskey nobody knew. And after 22 June, 1881, nobody was interested.

It started just after 4:30pm that day - the longest day of the year - when a quartet of porters at the small Arcade Saloon were struggling to manhandle a full 300 pound,46 inch tall by 24 inch wide, 46 gallon oak barrel of whiskey out from behind the bar. It was a time of day when sensible Hispanic residents were practicing the art of the siesta. But the mercenary Americans refused to bow to such common sense. The thermometer had peaked well above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, The air was so dry, the sweat evaporated right off the work men's skin. 

Out side, both Allen (above, Arcade is on right, half way up the street) and Fifth streets (opening to the right) were nearly empty. And in the shadowy narrow interior of the Arcade, languid drunks nursed warm beers while listless games of faro and poker were being played almost out of habit. But the owner, being a penny pincher by profession, ordered the weary stock men to pause in their efforts, to allow interia to regain its hold on their awkward burden, remove the barrel's tap and measure the liquid within. He did not want to miss even a dime of credit for the sour whiskey.  So the workmen did as they were told. Which is how they damn near burned down the entire town of Tombstone.

Once tapped it had been discovered the whiskey in the barrel had "gone sour", succumbing to the heat and an inefficient seal, the alcohol evaporating and the heat spoiling the grain broth left behind. Braving the "waft of acetone" and fungus billowing up from small opening,  one workman slid a stick gauge (above) into the liquid,  but let it slip from his fingers. It disappeared with a slunk into the thickening witches' brew. And after uttering a curse at his own mistake, the poor dumb soul leaned over the barrel to see if he could spy the missing tool in the murk, and he forgot the lighted cigar clenched in his teeth.

As the Tombstone Nugget explained, "A terrific explosion followed, scattering the blazing fluid in all directions and enveloping the whole structure in flames in the twinkling of an eye." But, the Nugget noted with a touch of annoyance, "...of the four men who stood around that portentous barrel not one of them was even singed." The Arcade, however, was not so lucky. The flames greedily consumed the bone dry wood, erecting a wall of flames that blocked the front door of the tiny establishment. As if a switch had been thrown, the suddenly electrified patrons, in unison, abandoned their languid reposes, and scrambled for the back door.

Three doors west, in the Golden Eagle Brewery, owner Edward Milton Joyce heard shouts of "Fire!", saw the flames, and tried to rescue $1,200 in cash from his safe.  But the flames drove him out of the building. Around the corner on Fifth Street, at "Saffors and Company Bank", the manager had the opposite problem. At the first shouts of fire, he threw all the cash into the safe and spun the dial, and just managed to escape as the building roof crashed in behind him. The entire block went up in flames within five minutes.

Within another half hour, the blazing beast  had consumed the tinderbox buildings north to Fremont Street, and south to Toughnut.  Wrote John Clum, "Everybody went wild. Your correspondent picked up a little girl who was returning from school and got bewildered...I passed one house where a lady and her two daughters were engaged in...futile efforts to get a five hundred pound piano out of the house..."  

When the flames hit the row of "bawdy houses" east of Sixth Street the denizens were forced to drop whatever they had in in hand, and wearing in what they had or did not have on, to run out of doors. One prostitute ran from her place of business carrying "a bird-cage in hand, and a dress in the other. Another rushed frantically down the street, attired in a robe of Burlap, with vail of green mosquito netting on her bead. "  Amazingly, somehow, nobody was killed or even seriously burned. 

Four square city blocks - 60 buildings, 20% of the town - were consumed within 45 minutes. The only thing that stopped the fire was a desperate bucket brigade and because the down wind end of the fire ran out of town to burn. In three quarters of an hour one hundred souls lost their living space, and $300,000 went up in smoke, most of it uninsured. And yet before the last ember had winked out, somebody put up a sign in front of a pile of timber ashes, which read, "We will reopen when it cools."

The fires never touched the mines, and with silver still coming out of the ground and wages still being paid, rebuilding began almost immediately. Eighteen days later Ms. Clara Brown attended the opening of the rebuilt "Golden Eagle" - now renamed "The Crystal Palace".  She assured her readers in far off San Diego that "The Palace " was "...simply gorgeous...The bar is a marvel of beauty...Every evening music from a piano and a violin attracts a crowd..." There were fewer wood frame structures this time, many opting for adobe, such as the new Wells Fargo Office and the Bird Cage Theatre ", built in the vacant lot where Sheriff Fred White had died.

Since Marshal Sippy was out of town, Deputy U.S. Marshal Virgil Earp (above) stepped in. He hired dozens of temporary officers to police the burned out areas, ending all looting. He assigned 18 men as around the clock guards for the safe at the Wells Fargo office, now repository of most of the town's cash. He did so well that by the end of June, Ben Sippy had been fired. Ben left behind angry creditors, but no solid evidence of any crimes committed. But Ben also gave the town it's new marshal - Virgil Earp, now wearing 2 hats, with jurisdiction not only in the town, but across the entire territory as Deputy Federal Marshal for Tombstone.

While the rebuilding was reaching its peak, Joe Hill rode back into town, collecting the watch and cash he had left with Virgil. But he brought only bad news - depending on how you looked at it. All 4 of the men who had tried to rob the Bisbee stage were now dead. Escapee Luther King had been killed, probably by his fellow Cochise County Cow Boys, because he had identified his accomplices to the Earp posse.  Harry Head and Jim Crane were executed by the same because they had botched the robbery, and killing the driver Bud Pierpot had brought too much attention on the rustlers. 

But most troubling of all for the Cow Boys was the death of one time jeweler Bill Leonard, who ran south, away from the vengeful Cow Boys and the determined Earp posse, until he found friends who had yet to hear of the Bisbee stage fiasco.  But in escaping across the border into Mexico, Bill Leonard crossed paths with a rustling party returning north with 800 head of cattle,  lead by Old Man Clanton.  Unfortunately, the Clanton party were being tracked by Sonorian Ruales under Commandant Felipe Neri.

Just at dawn on 13 August, 1881 about 25 Mexican militia opened fire on the rustlers, killing 4 of them - Bill Leonard probably died in his sleep.  Dick Gray and Billy Lang died trying to escape. And "Old Man" Newman Hawes Clanton was shot while leaning over the breakfast fire. The slaughter in the canyon was undeniable proof that law and order was closing the open frontier, from both sides of the border. The anarchy, which had allowed rustlers a viable business model, was being squeezed out of existence.

For the Clanton and the McLaury families, the death of their patriarch (above) was a body blow. The grief, and the tightening web of law enforcement on both sides of the border,  induced a feeling of helplessness, and anger.  Wyatt Earp would later testify that after the Guadalupe Massicure, “Ike Clanton and Frank McLaury,....shunned us, and Morgan, Virgil Earp, Doc Holliday and myself began to hear their threats against us.”  The fuse that had been burning for 20 years, had suddenly been cut short.

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TIME TRAVELERS

I can’t believe we are doing it again. We got along for nine thousand years without doing it, and now we do it twice a year. It was a dumb idea when we did it the first time and now that we’re doing it  twice a year? Why?! Doing a dumb thing twice does not make it smart. Why are we doing this again?! 

The persons to blame for this are the obsessive-compulsive bureaucrats who champion the so-called Daylight Saving Time – and there is no “s” at the end of “Saving” because it’s modifying time, not daylight, which turns out to be more than a symbolic difference,  I told you these clock watchers were obsessive compulsive.  But that dropped “s” should also give you a hint that this whole thing is one great fraud being perpetrated on each and every one of us in the name of good grammar. So on November Fifth  at 2:00 AM, we will "fall back", adjust our clocks again because we’re all supposed to.  It's a unity thing, I guess. We are all dumb together because being dumb together is better than being smart individually.  I guess being smart together is not an option. And come Sunday, 11 March, 2018, you know in advance that you are not going to feeling like "springing" anywhere an hour earlier, and yet we will.  Because its the law, or a rule or something. These endless adjustments are an endless treadmill of dumbness.

Experts assure me that during Daylight Saving Time we’re going to save 10,000 barrels of oil a day, reduce crime and spend more time out of doors with our families in the evenings during summer. Of course your iPad and your iPhone might start displaying some rare Lapland dialect if you tried to instruct it to ignore the whole thing.  But why are we doing this again?!  They first tried this half baked scheme back in World War One, and as soon as the war was over they dumped it. And now, every time some liberal one-world type comes up with another energy saving idea, we are all required to smile and call it "green":  But I wonder about all that extra fossil fuel we burn come come spring again, every morning to light our darkened bedrooms, not to mention run our computers, TVs, hair dryers, electric razors, water heaters and all those headlights. We used to say that people who rose early got up with the cows. Well, the cows are not getting up any earlier. Nor are the chickens. Why the hell are we?

As everybody keeps pointing out, it was Ben Franklin who first purposed Daylight Saving in his essay “An Economical Project”, (but in French, of course) (above)  in which he suggested that if authorities were to “…Oblige a man to rise at four in the morning, …it is probable he will go willingly to bed at eight in the evening." Unless, of course, he takes a nap. But, yeah, if you make him get up earlier he will probably go to bed earlier. And if we set him on fire, it is probable he will not litter. It is an interesting idea from the eighteenth century’s second most famous reprobate, but it strikes me like accepting interior decorating suggestions from the Marque de Sade, who was the first most famous reprobate.  How do we know that Ben wasn't  just joking?

Well, if he was, then Congressman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), who wrote the amendment to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 requiring Daylight Saving Time, missed the punch line. What a surprise, a Republican with no sense of humor. So the same Congress that has refused to raise the minimum wage for 20  years found the time to steal an hour of your sleep every March and screw with your sanity every November. In the next election I suggest voting for Ben Franklin. It would make as much sense.

Ben was trying to save about 64 million pounds of candle wax a year. Well, look how much wax we saved by inventing electricity! And, didn't Ben have something to do with that?  Kite, key, electrical storm -  any of this sound familiar?  Listen, didn't Ben see this whole electricity thing coming? And speaking of electricity, according to the New Jersey Public Service Enterprise Group, Daylight Saving has “no impact” on energy demands in their service area. And the government of Kazakhstan has already dropped the whole idea of “saving daylight”.  Are we dumber than the Kazakhastanies? 

According to the University of California Energy Institute, daylight saving does not actually save energy, it just moves it around. And a recent study of electric bills in Indiana found that the time "shifters" are actually costing each Hoosier almost $3.00 a year MORE -  about $8.6 million a year in total, plus somewhere between $1.6 and $5.3 million in pollution costs for generating all that extra electricity for getting up and going to work in the dark!. And if that is what it costs Hoosiers (like me), think what it costing people in New Jersey!  Just think about it. A little more energy conservation like this and we might as well just start burning coal again.

And another problem with this bi-annual adjustment to our sense of reality is that our brains can’t adjust without being told to, while computers solve the problem without a hitch. So while our electronics no longer need a "time patch” for programs, humans require psychiatric assistance to adjust to the depression brought on by lost sleep ever spring!  To quote from Ken Fisher’s article for ARS,  “So while the US government pats itself on the back for at least looking busy, know that the main goal – energy conservation – has not been met….Isn’t arbitrary, mostly meaningless change, great?”  Hell, no, it isn’t.

Still, I’m willing to be cooperative.  If we need more daylight then let’s move the clocks forward and be done with it. Why fall back in the fall? Listen, if the majority of the population decides that at noon tomorrow we should all pretend that it is now 10:45 AM, I’d go along with that. But for heaven’s sake please stop moving the clocks back and forth and back and forth as if we were keeping time with Mexican jumping beans. Why are we doing this to ourselves? Pick a damn time and leave it the hell alone!

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