By Mark Abromaitis
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

It started as a simple thank you, a way to recognize the efforts of a single-parent father. But it has since grown into a major, nationally recognized occasion.

Father’s Day is celebrated popularly on 3rd Sunday in June in just about every part of the world, including the United States. But the idea for creating a day for children to honor their fathers had simple beginnings in the town of Spokane, Washington.

Equal recognition
According to the history books, a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd thought of the idea for Father's Day while sitting in a pew of a church, listening to a Mothers Day sermon in 1909.

Having been raised by her father, Henry Jackson Smart, after her mother died during the birth of their sixth child, she thought it was important to recognize the efforts of fathers too. The young lady felt that often times fathers sacrifices were forgotten. It was her father that made all the parental sacrifices and, in the eyes of his daughter, was a courageous, selfless, and loving man.

So Dodd campaigned to have the day recognized and with support from the Spokane Ministerial Association and the YMCA, her efforts paid off. The town proclaimed the date “fathers day.”

An idea catches fire
Sonora's father was born in June, so she chose to hold the first fathers day on the 19th of June, 1910.

Then the idea caught on. Other towns and cities began to celebrate the occasion too. And in 1924 President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed the third Sunday in June as Father's Day. Coolidge made it a national event to "establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children and to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations."

President Lyndon Johnson issued a presidential proclamation in 1966 commemorating the day, but it wasn’t until 1972 that President Richard Nixon established a permanent national observance of Father's Day.