First Father’s Day

Sonora Smart Dodd was just 16 years old when her mother died, leaving her father to take care of her and five brothers on a farm in Spokane, Eastern Washington. When she was 27, she heard a Mother’s Day sermon at the local Central United Methodist Church, which inspired to propose a equivalent day honoring her father and fathers everywhere.

On this day, June 19, in 1910, with the help of her pastor and the Spokane YMCA, the first Father’s Day was celebrated in the city. Sonora originally intended to make June 5, her father’s birthday, the date of the holiday, but that left too little time to prepare. The celebration was delayed for two weeks, and opened with sermons all over the city of the value of fathers and family.

Father’s Day became a nationally recognized holiday in 1924 by an act of President Calvin Coolidge. In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a proclamation calling for the third Sunday in June to be recognized as Father’s Day, and six years later President Richard Nixon signed a proclamation permanently placing Father’s Day on the third Sunday in June.