Father’s Day: 5 Surprising Facts About the Holiday

Spokane, Washington, resident Sonora Smart Dodd is generally credited as the founder of Father’s Day, but American popular culture historian Daniel Gifford says that’s a bit of an exaggeration. “What Dodd did was get the ball rolling in Spokane,” he says.

Dodd was the oldest of six children whose mother died in childbirth, leaving her father to raise them alone. Her idea came after a Mother’s Day sermon in 1909, when she decided fathers like hers deserved the same honor. The next year, churches across Spokane held some of the first Father’s Day observances in the country. Community members wore roses, the official flower of Father’s Day, to recognize local fathers.

But Dodd wasn’t the only American who suggested fathers should have an honorary day like mothers did. “Jane Addams, the famous social worker that founded Hull-House Museum in Chicago, [was asking] should Chicago have a Father’s Day, as early as 1911,” Gifford says. Representative J. Hampton Moore of Pennsylvania introduced a bill in 1913 to make it a national holiday, but it failed.

Dodd’s decision to pay homage to her father in Spokane also played a role in the date the holiday falls on the calendar. When Dodd worked with area ministers and the YMCA to organize the 1910 city-wide observance, she suggested it be June 5, which was her father’s birthday. But the date got pushed back to the third Sunday in June, and Americans have celebrated Father’s Day on that day ever since, Gifford explains.

The country’s first known Father’s Day celebration was inspired by the worst mining disaster in American history. On December 6, 1907, a blast destroyed two coal mines in Monongah, West Virginia, instantly killing at least 362 people, including Grace Golden Clayton’s father.

Clayton was so distraught, she suggested her church immortalize the men who were killed that day. Her pastor, Robert Thomas Webb, agreed, and they held a Father’s Day service on Sunday, July 5, 1908, at Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church South (now Central United Methodist Church), in Fairmont, West Virginia.

Whereas this observance was strictly local, overshadowed by Independence Day and not repeated, the first Father’s Day celebration in Spokane was widely publicized. News of the Spokane sermons reached all the way to Washington, D.C., though it still took 62 years for Father’s Day to become a national holiday. Dodd was 90 years old when it finally happened.

Americans have been celebrating Father’s Day for more than a century, but Catholic populations in Europe have observed St. Joseph’s Day since the 15th century.

St. Joseph’s Day, on March 19, is the Catholic feast day for the legal father of Jesus who is considered the patron saint of fathers and families. Homilies in honor of Joseph “focus on the fatherly role he played to Jesus,” Gifford says. “He was his protector, he helped raise him, and he guided him.” In 1621, Pope Gregory XV made the Feast of St. Joseph a holy day of obligation.

Many countries around the world honor their dads in some way, but it’s not always in June. Italy, especially the island of Sicily, observes the holiday on St. Joseph’s Day in March. In Germany, it’s tied to the Christian holiday of Ascension Day, which is 40 days after Easter and when Jesus is thought to have ascended to heaven. This means German Father’s Day can take place in May or June. Australians don’t celebrate until the first Sunday in September, which is the first Sunday of spring in the southern hemisphere. Other countries, including India and Japan, celebrate Father’s Day similarly to the U.S. and on the same day.