Father’s Day is the day we mark and celebrate the contribution your own father, or father figure, has made to your life. It was inspired by Mother’s Day and a daughter’s love for her widowed dad.
The first Father’s Day was celebrated June 19, 1910, in the state of Washington, but it wasn’t until 1972, 58 years after President Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day official, that the day honoring fathers became a nationwide holiday in the U.S.
The campaign to celebrate the nation’s fathers did not meet with the same enthusiasm – perhaps because, as one florist explained, “fathers haven’t the same sentimental appeal that mothers have.” Maybe that’s right and maybe that’s wrong, but the fact is, the first event explicitly in honor of fathers occurred July 5, 1908, in a West Virginia church in the form of a Sunday sermon in memory of 362 men who had perished in explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company in Monongah the previous December. It was, however, a one-time commemoration.
A year later, Sonora Smart of Spokane, Washington, one of six children raised by a widower, tried to establish an office equivalent to Mother’s Day for male parents. She got support from local churches, the YMCA, shopkeepers and government officials and the state of Washington celebrated the nation’s first statewide Father’s Day on June 19, 1910.
Popularity for the holiday spread. In 1916 President Woodrow Wilson honored the day by using telegraph signals to unfurl a flag in Spokane when he pressed a button in Washington, D.C. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge urged state governments to observe Father’s Day. Today Father’s Day is celebrated in the U.S. on the third Sunday of June. In other countries – especially in Europe and Latin America – fathers are honored on St. Josheph’s Day, a traditional Catholic holiday that falls on March 19.
For those who feel holidays such as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Valentine’s Day are “retailer’s holidays” you would be interested to know during the 1920s and 1930s, a movement arose to scrap Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in favor of a single holiday they called Parent’s Day. Each year on the designated days rallies (protests) were held by pro-Parents’ Day groups in New York’s Central Park. The depression derailed this effort, however. Struggling retailers and advertisers redoubled their efforts to make Father’s Day a “second Christmas” for me, promoting goods such as neckties, hats, socks, pipes and tobacco, golf clubs and other sporting goods and of course, greeting cards.
In 1972, in the middle of a hard-fought presidential re-election campaign, Richard Nixon signed a proclamation making Father’s Day a nation-wide holiday at last. Today, economists estimate that Americans spend more than $1 billion each year on Father’s Day gifts.
That’s a lot of neckties!
