{"id":218,"date":"2017-06-16T15:45:11","date_gmt":"2017-06-16T15:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fredgrams.com\/blog\/?p=218"},"modified":"2018-06-15T02:36:41","modified_gmt":"2018-06-15T02:36:41","slug":"a-history-of-fathers-day-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fredgrams.com\/blog\/a-history-of-fathers-day-in-america\/","title":{"rendered":"A History of Father’s Day in America"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Father<\/a><\/p>\n

FredGrams.com<\/a> is about beautiful, musical greeting cards for every Holiday<\/a> and Occasion<\/a>, and the national holiday honoring our fathers\u00a0is no exception. If at a loss about what gifts for Dad would be most appropriate, consider a personal greeting like these. Like all FredGrams, our Father’s Day cards<\/a> are a combination of beautiful graphics enhanced by music and words, often inspirational quotes, most often lyrics to the song playing under the images. Among your\u00a0Father’s Day choices<\/a>: “Smiles<\/a>,” “He’s Me Pal<\/a>,” “Vintage Fathers<\/a> (“All Through The Night”),\u00a0To GrandDad<\/a> (“Sweet And Low”), To Dad<\/a> (inspiring quotes and images, original music), \u00a0and more quotes with the beautiful musical background of a famous Bach Fugue<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The establishment of Father’s Day as an official national holiday was, inexplicably, a long and seemingly tortuous path, extending from a simple church service in 1910 to a long-awaited Presidential signature in 1972, making Father’s Day officially the third Sunday in June. One early objection raised (by politicians!) was commercialism. The financial\u00a0prospects for\u00a0Father’s day gifts, Happy Father’s day cards and the like offended those blind to \u00a0Calvin Coolidge’s undeniable truism, that “the business of America is business.”<\/p>\n

The earliest Western celebrations of Father’s Day date\u00a0back to medieval times as a tribute to Nutritor Domini,\u00a0“the putative father” of Jesus, St. Joseph, his day on the Catholic calendar being March 19.<\/p>\n

Father’s Day’s timeline\u00a0in America dates back to December, 1907 when a West Virginia mining disaster left a thousand fatherless children, and a woman named Grace Golden Clayton organized a memorial service in Fairmont for her own and the hundreds of other fathers lost in the accident. Perhaps not by coincidence,\u00a0the first Mother’s Day observance came shortly thereafter on the second Sunday in May, 1908 when Anna Jarvis<\/a> organized a church service in honor of her mother in Grafton, another\u00a0West Virginia town.<\/p>\n

Without the drive of a single-minded force like Jarvis, Father’s Day took longer than Mother’s Day to establish itself, and accounts vary as to who finally gets the credit. Famous Chicago social crusader\u00a0Jane Addams proposed it in 1911 but was turned down. In 1912, there was a Father’s Day celebration in Vancouver organized by Methodist pastor J.J. Berringer. A member of Lions Club International, Harry Meek, made concerted, repeated efforts to make\u00a0Father’s Day a national holiday in 1915.<\/p>\n

But it appears that a Spokane, Washingtonian named Sonora Smart Dodd gets posterity’s nod\u00a0for\u00a0being the\u00a0“Mother of Father’s Day.” One of six children raised singlehandedly by a\u00a0widowed father, Dodd heard a lecture about Jarvis and Mother’s Day in 1909 and prevailed upon her own congregation to schedule a similar event for fathers on June 5, \u00a01910. The event would eventually be moved to June 19, the third Sunday of the month.<\/p>\n