Father’s Day, Celestial & Terrestrial
Radio Commentary, 90.7, 91.7 New Life FM, June 13, 2014 – By Sue Ella Deadwyler
Good morning, Jim. Although my Dad went to heaven many years ago, I’m still grateful to Sonora Smart Dodd who founded Father’s Day in 1910 at the Spokane, Washington YMCA. Her father was a Civil War veteran who raised his six children as a single parent in Spokane.
After hearing a Mothers’ Day sermon in 1909, she told her pastor there should be a similar holiday honoring fathers, and he agreed to observe Fathers’ Day on June 19th. She wanted it observed on her father’s birthday, June 5th, but the pastor needed more time than that to prepare his sermon.
By the 1920s Sonora Dodd was studying in the Art Institute of Chicago and had no time to promote the holiday. But she went back to Spokane in the 1930s to promote it again. By 1938 she was joined by the Father’s Day Council, founded by New York’s Associated Men’s Wear Retailers who saw it as a commercial goldmine. By the mid-1980s the Council wrote that “…Fathers’ Day had become a Second Christmas for all the men’s gift-oriented industries.” President Woodrow Wilson went to Spokane to speak in the 1916 Fathers’ Day celebration and wanted to make it an official holiday then, but Congress resisted, thinking it would become too commercialized. Two failed attempts to formally recognize the holiday in Congress could have been behind a congressional scolding from Maine’s Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who accused Congress of ignoring fathers for 40 years, by honoring only one of our parents.
Senator Smith administered that scolding in 1957, but it was nine years before President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation designating the third Sunday in June as Fathers’ Day. Six years later in 1972, President Richard Nixon signed the law, making Fathers’ Day a permanent holiday, 63 years after Sonora Dodd honored her father at the Young Men’s Christian Association in Spokane.
As Fathers’ Day approaches, I’m reminded of a news report this week about a dad who died trying to save his son from drowning. He personified a father’s love for his children. Then, I’m reminded that our Heavenly Father loves us so much that He sent His Son to die for our sins. As we celebrate Fathers’ Day and honor our earthly fathers, let’s honor our Heavenly Father, too. For Georgia Insight I’m Sue Ella Deadwyler, your Capitol correspondent.