National and International Days and Country Information: Father's Day - Third Sunday

Saturday, June 19, 2021

Father's Day - Third Sunday - June

Father's Day - 20 June 2021

Father's Day was founded in Spokane, Washington at the YMCA in 1910 by Sonora Smart Dodd. Its first celebration was in the Spokane YMCA on June 19, 1910. Her father, William Jackson Smart was a Civil War veteran and as a single parent, he raised his six children. After hearing a sermon about Mother's Day in 1909, she told her pastor that fathers should have a similar holiday honoring them. She wanted it to happen on June 5, her father's birthday, but the pastors did not have enough time to prepare their sermons, and the celebration was deferred to the third Sunday of June.

In the 1920s, Dodd went to Chicago to study in the Art Institute of Chicago and the event faded into relative obscurity. In the 1930s Dodd returned to Spokane and started promoting the celebration again and raised the awareness at a national level. She took the help of those trade groups that supply men's gift items, for example the manufacturers of ties and tobacco pipes. In 1938, the Father's Day Council, founded by the New York Associated Men's Wear Retailers came into existence to consolidate and systematize the commercial promotion. Americans resisted the holiday during a few decades, but the trade groups kept promoting it and eventually succeeded. By the mid-1980s the Father's Council stated that Father's Day sales are only next to Christmas Day sales for all the men's gift-oriented industries.

In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honoring fathers, designating the third Sunday in June as Father's Day. Six years later, the day was made a permanent national holiday when President Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1972.