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.