A new little toy: Google News Archive Search. It apparently has news archives from throughout the 20th century. Some of the articles it generates are a little squirrelly because in some cases the optical character recognition doesn’t seem to have worked very well. And, in other cases, I think maybe the scanning process didn’t do a good job of following articles as they moved between colunns. Still, it’s a lot of fun. Apparently my great, great uncle was a Democratic judge in Indianapolis in the 1920s. I had no idea.
I’m just goofing around at the moment, but this seems to be a decent resource for my time zone, daylight saving time obsession. For example, this article from September 1961 tells us:
The Interstate Commerce Commission last July 21 moved the eastern TIME zone It used to follow the Ohio-INDIANA line. Now I it zigzags down the middle of In- diana, putting 51 of the state’s 92 counties in the eastern zone. The remainder of the counties mostly are planning to switch to light TIME Oct. 29. A few fringe areas, however, will go along with eastern TIME. Until two months ago an INDIANA law required DAYLIGHT TIME to end the last Sunday in September.
Searching for Indiana time zone revealed a couple of earlier articles which I could sort of follow but which are too scrambled to blockquote here. They reveal that the Chamber of Commerce was in favor of moving the time zone westward from the Indiana/Ohio line whereas the Farm Bureau was opposed. Some of the discussion revealed anticipation that the time line would be moved to the Indiana/Illinois border or perhaps all the way west to the Mississippi.
The archive also reveals this May 12, 1967 article from Time Magazine which has this to say about Indiana:
Indiana has asked D.O.T. to revise the boundaries so that the entire state falls in the Central Time zone; meanwhile, eastern Indiana will remain on Eastern Standard and thus keep the same time as the western portion, which is on Central Daylight all year long.
The first article should say 43 instead of 51. It was right in saying the new boundary zigzaged down the middle of the state. I wish I could put the map of the 1961 boundary on your blog. It would show how the state was butchered up by the ruling. I still wonder how in good conscience anyone could do such a thing. 33 Indiana neighboring counties were separated from each other by moving the boundary from the Ohio line to the middle of Indiana. Even St. Joseph and Elkhart counties were separated.
The 1967 request was triggered by the 1966 Uniform Time Act that required each state to uniformly observe daylight time or excuse itself altogether. I don’t think the western counties ever observed CDT all year.
Google is a remarkable research tool. And to think it is still in its infancy.
I did most of my research at the Indiana State Library located at Senate and Ohio streets in Indianapolis. The 2 times I went there last year I searched newspaper articles that are stored on microfilm. They have file cards that lets you find which microfilm contains the subject matter you are interested in. It was a very time consuming and not all the print was legible. This year I asked a librarian how to find time articles and he showed me the mother lode. The library has actual newspaper clippings arranged by subject. There were 3 folders for “Time”. It was so much better than searching the microfilm. I got some excellent copies that are very legible.
As luck would have it, I have a copy of the 1961 map available here. It truly is a work of art.