Video: 'Celebrating dad'

(Sunday, June 19, 1910) — Father’s Day was celebrated for the first time in the United States today at the YMCA in Spokane, Washington.

Sonora Smart Dodd, a young Spokane mother, artist, and poet, conceived the idea in 1909 when she was sitting in Spokane’s Central Methodist Church listening to a Mother’s Day sermon extolling the virtues of mothers.

“I like everything you have said about motherhood,” she told the pastor after the service. “But somehow, ‘father’ seems something apart. Do you not think it would be fair and fine to give father a place in the sun?”

Dodd persuaded the Spokane Ministerial Alliance and the local YMCA to observe the nation’s first Father’s Day. The ministers settle on a date of June 19, 1910, and delivered sermons all around city about the importance and obligations of fatherhood.

The story was picked up by wire services and the idea gains momentum in communities all around the country.

By the 1920s, Father’s Day would be commonly observed (though not officially recognized) throughout the country.

In 1972, President Richard M. Nixon will make it a permanent national holiday.