Happy Belated Father's Day!

If you are lucky enough to have a father in your life, we hope you had a wonderful day this past weekend enjoying his company and celebrating his accomplishments. We also thought you might like to know how Father's Day came about, and you might be surprised to learn how far back the tradition goes.

Archeologists tell us that the earliest mention on record of a child honoring his father is from about 4,000 years ago in Babylon, where a loving son named Elmesu carved a tablet wishing his father "health and longevity." Not exactly a Hallmark greeting but certainly a good start! Fast forward to more modern times, and there are European cultures that incorporated a celebration of fathers on St. Joseph's Day, usually in March.

It was not until the early twentieth century that Father's Day began as a tradition in the United States. It had a false start in 1908 and then was revived and took off two years later; both attempts, incidentally, were begun by women!

First, on 5 July 1908, in Fairmont, West Virginia, a woman named Grace Golden Clayton organized a church service to honor fathers after a mining accident took the lives of hundreds of men in what was called "the worst mining accident in U.S. history." Grace, whose father died in the accident, sought to pay tribute to him and others who were killed, as well as those who survived. However, she had no way to promote her event, and so it never went any further than the original service.

Meanwhile, across the country in Spokane, Washington, Sonora Smart Dodd attended a church service honoring mothers, which got her to thinking of the bravery and strength of her own father. William Jackson Smart was a Civil War veteran and a farmer. He and his wife Ellen had five young children when Ellen died in childbirth in 1898, leaving William to raise all of them, including a newborn infant, as a single parent. Sonora was able to convince the Spokane Ministerial Association and the YMCA to set aside a day in June to honor fathers such as her own. She hoped it might be on his birthday, June 5th, but the group wanted more time after Mother's Day, so the sermon was set for the third Sunday in June.

And that is how, on Sunday, 19 June 1910, the first Father's Day in the U.S. began. Sonora used the occasion to hand out gifts to disabled fathers. Young men from the YMCA wore roses in their lapels to honor both living and deceased fathers, and ministers in the city of Spokane delivered services praising fatherhood.

That is not the end of the story, though. In spite of widespread public favor and support from several presidents, Congress was unable to pass legislation making Father's Day a national holiday until almost sixty years later. In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson set the third Sunday in June for the holiday, but he did it by executive order. Finally, in 1972, Congress made it official, and President Nixon signed the bill into law. Fortunately, Sonora Dodd got to see this hard-fought legislature pass; she died at the age of ninety-six in 1978.

So, however and wherever fathers fit into your family, we hope you gave a thought or two to the men who came before you, who supported the people they loved and worked hard to keep them thriving. We hope you remembered those who are gone and were able to spend quality time with those who are in your life now. And even though we are a day late, Happy Father's Day to all!

Learn more here:

"Father's Day (United States), " Wikipedia,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father%27s_Day_(United_States)

"The Forgotten History of Father's Day," by Aurelia C. Scott, 4 June 2025, Almanac.com,  https://www.almanac.com/forgotten-history-fathers-day

"The Surprising History of Father's Day," by Emily Basil, undated, Catholic Charities of Southwest Kansas, https://catholiccharitiesswks.org/home/news/29-home/news/general/844-the-surprising-history-of-father-s-day