After hearing a sermon about Mother's Day in 1909, Dodd told her pastor that fathers deserved a similar day. Her father, William Jackson Smart, had raised her and her five siblings as a single parent in Spokane. She suggested June 5, his birthday, but the city's ministers asked for more time to prepare their sermons, so the first celebration was moved to the third Sunday of June, which in 1910 fell on June 19.
The idea took decades to catch on nationally. President Woodrow Wilson travelled to Spokane in 1916 to speak at a Father's Day celebration and wanted to make it official, but Congress resisted, fearing commercialisation.
Dodd herself stopped promoting the day in the 1920s while she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, and it faded into obscurity even in Spokane. She returned to the campaign in the 1930s with the help of the trades that stood to gain most, such as makers of ties and tobacco pipes, and from 1938 a Father's Day Council founded by New York menswear retailers promoted the day.
In 1966 President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honouring fathers on the third Sunday in June. Six years later, on April 24, 1972, President Richard Nixon signed the law that made Father's Day a permanent national holiday.
Key people: Sonora Smart Dodd