by Tenebris

Created on: June 15, 2008   Last Updated: June 18, 2008

On the third Sunday in June, millions of families around the world will mark a special day to thank their fathers for their dedication, their guidance, and their love. While light echoes of a day acknowledging fatherhood go back at least as far as the Festival of Zeus in ancient Greece, the modern version of Father's Day was born in the United States nearly a century ago. The choice of day was formalised in 1966, and was officially signed into federal law in 1972 by then-president Richard Nixon.

Father's special day was born in the overcoming of adversity that so often follows great tragedy. In 1907, a terrible mine explosion in Fairmont, West Virginia, had taken the lives of 361 men, most of whom had been the sole providers for their families. On July 5 of the following year at the urging of Grace Golden Clayton, perhaps inspired by the first ever formal celebration of a Mother's Day two months earlier in Grafton, another city in the same state, the Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church (south) held a memorial service for these men, which at the same time became a celebration of their lives and their roles as fathers.

Two years later, Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington, approached the Spokane Ministerial Alliance to publicly celebrate her father, William Jackson Smart, a Arkansas veteran of the American Civil War who had been left to raise six children by himself after his wife died of childbirth, as well as the institution of fatherhood itself. Her proposed date for the community-wide celebration, June 5, was her father's birthday; but the Ministerial Allance pushed back the date by two weeks to June 19, 1910.

This marked the very first time a father's day had been celebrated on the third Sunday in June. Sonora's role in establishing this special day would later be honoured at the 1974 Spokane World Fair.

Gradually word of these celebrations spread, and the seeds sown by the two separate commorative celebrations gradually grew into many small annual events across the United States. Celebration of a June Father's Day became custom even in the household of then-president Woodrow Wilson. By 1924, driven by such politicians as William Jennings Bryan, celebration of a June Father's Day was recommended by then-president Calvin Coolidge.

In 1956, the United States Congress and Senate passed a joint resolution recognising Father's Day, opening the door for then-president Richard Nixon to sign the national holiday into law in 1972. Today, forty-three other countries around the world share the same special day.

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