The nation’s first Father’s Day was celebrated on June 19, 1910, in Spokane, Washington thanks to the efforts of Sonora Smart Dodd. After Sonora attended one of the first official Mother’s Day services in 1909, she decided that fathers deserved the same recognition.
Her father, William Jackson Smart, was a twice-married, twice-widowed Civil War veteran and father of 14 children. Sonora was the oldest child of the second marriage. When she was 16, her mother, Ellen, died, leaving William to care for Sonora and her 5 younger brothers and sisters. By Sonora’s account, he performed brilliantly. “I remember everything about him,” Sonora said many years later. “He was both father and mother to me and my brothers and sisters.” She considered him to be both devoted and selfless which inspired her to spend much of the next 60 years pushing for official recognition of Father’s Day as a national holiday.
Six years before Sonora’s death at the age of 96, President Richard Nixon finally signed a Congressional resolution declaring the third Sunday in June to be Father’s Day.
