Somewhere in Time

When I was a kid, our family frequently crossed the line between Chicago time and Michigan time because my father's parents lived in Stevensville, Michigan and my Uncle Ed and Aunt Mil had a summer home in New Buffalo. That was what my family called it, "Chicago time and Michigan time". As I grew older and went to school, I learned about the various time zones but, until then, I thought that there were only two times in the world, Chicago time and Michigan time. My parents seemed to believe that Chicago time was the correct time, and that Michigan time was an hour off. My grandmother, on the other hand, believed that Michigan time was the correct time and that Chicago time was an hour off. The issue was also confused by Daylight Saving Time because Michigan did not go on DST in the summer like Chicago did, so there was no time difference in the summer. I don't think that Indiana ever went on DST and, last I heard, they still didn't. That didn't matter to us because we only passed through Indiana on our way to and from Michigan, so nobody cared what time it was in Indiana.

Truth be known, Michigan could have ended up in the Central Time Zone instead of the Eastern time Zone because the line that divided the two went right down the middle of Michigan. At some point it was decided that the line should jog around Michigan so that the whole state would be in the same time zone. In those days, there was more traffic between Detroit and New York than there was between Detroit and Chicago, so the Detroit people wanted to be on the same time as New York. Detroit was a bigger deal then than it is now, and the rest of the state was not so much, so it was decided to put Michigan in the Eastern Time Zone, except for the western part of the Upper Peninsula, which had more in common with Wisconsin than it had with the rest of Michigan. So it came to pass that the people on the Lake Huron shore are pretty comfortable with their time, while the people on the Lake Michigan shore feel like they are an hour off. Cheboygan, being close to the middle, is only a half hour off. The other half hour difference in the rising and setting of the sun comes from the difference in latitude, as Ken has surmised.

I looked up those Stoics on Wiki. I didn't read he whole article but, as near as I can tell, they made everything way more complicated than it needs to be. All those dead Greeks are like that. Maybe that's why, even unto this day, when somebody doesn't understand something, they say "It's all Greek to me."