HALLS — Dwight Cate, 66, retired from the Knox County Schools bus garage, will leave the clock on his kitchen oven alone when the rest of Tennessee falls back on Nov. 1, as he has every November since 2019.
That year the Legislature passed a law putting the state on daylight time all year, provided Congress agrees. Congress has not agreed, and Cate takes the state at its word.
“They voted on it, it was in the paper,” Cate said. “Now Congress hasn’t done their part, fine, but that’s Congress. I’m not going to set the oven back and then forward again. You have to hold the button down and it beeps at you the whole time, and the buttons are up behind the vent hood, so I need the stool to even see what I’m pressing.”
On the Monday after the change the oven runs an hour ahead of the cable box and the clock in his truck. Cate reads it and subtracts. He got the subtracting wrong twice the first winter, and one of those times he took a ham out an hour early.
His wife, Pat, 65, runs the kitchen by the microwave, which she sets back herself.
“He says supper’s at five-thirty, and I say by what, and he says the oven, and I say that’s four-thirty,” she said. “We go around on that most nights till March, and then I just start when the microwave says to.”
The oven clock was last set the spring the law passed.