Los Alamos and Daylight Savings Time

By Kaity Burke

Did you know that Los Alamos was the only county in the state of New Mexico to participate in Daylight Savings Time (DST) for many years?

    In late April of 1946, a census was collected within Los Alamos regarding the adoption of Daylight Savings Time. In 1950 it was announced by the Atomic Energy Commision (AEC) that Los Alamos and the construction camp of White Rock would begin DST. Las Vegas had tried DST in May of 1946, but ultimately ended up reverting back to Standard time in July of the same year. No connection has been found yet between the efforts of Las Vegas and Los Alamos towards adopting DST.
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        In 1951, it was declared that participation of DST in New Mexico was left up to the people rather than the authorities setting a standard across the state. Los Alamos continued to be the only listed county participating in DST each year. Many of the articles about events happening in Los Alamos had to clarify whether the time of the event was in Standard Time or during DST. This included school sporting events, community events, talks, etc.

        The difference in times was a problem in the workforce too. A newspaper from Carlsbad talked about how Sandia Laboratory, Sandia Offices, and the Kirkland Air Force Base had to alter their summer workday schedules. These locations did not officially take on DST, but the personnel on site did start their workdays at 0700 or 0730 everyday during the summer. One of the reasons that they continued to do this for years was for the convenience in communications between locations and with others in DC.

    Sometimes the newspapers would publish complaints or statements of support towards DST. One segment that illustrates the frustrations of the time differences between workers was published by the Santa Fe New Mexican. To quote their publication of July 14th, 1959: “They have only four hours in an eight-hour working day to deal with each other, and they have plenty to talk over. For the first hour that Los Alamos workers are on the job, no one is at the Albuquerque AEC office. There’s a lost hour. Then, at lunch time, Los Alamos workers take off an hour earlier than the people in the Albuquerque AEC office. There’s another hour shot. Then the Los Alamos people get back on the job, but the Albuquerque people are out at lunch. At the end of the day, the fourth hour is lost.” The Los Alamos workers would complete their 8 hour work day an hour before the Albuquerque workers would.

    The state of New Mexico attempted to participate in DST in 1955, 9 years after the idea was brought up in Los Alamos and at least 5 years since it was started. The state started DST on the 30th of May in 1955, and ended up quitting in late June. This resulted with Los Alamos being the only county of NM to participate in DST again. In 1960, it was claimed that Los Alamos was the only fully operated town to do DST in New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas,  Utah, Arizona and Colorado.

      In March of 1965, a bill was presented to Congress regarding the standards for the participation of the nation in DST. The Uniform Time Act was passed the next month. New Mexico had some clarification issues when implementing the DST, and they even tried to get special approval to not be included in the nationwide DST in 1967. Their request to the Senate was denied.

       Due to multiple conflicting recollections and sources, the information for this post was collected from sources outside of Los Alamos.


Further research is being conducted and any additional information would be appreciated.