Happy Father's Day

 To My Dad Charlie,

 HAPPY FATHER'S DAY

Having a great Dad in your life is a real blessing.

 Happy Father's Day

to my Darling Husband

who is a great Dad to his 3 children

as well as to our 2 westies.

Origins of Father's Day

The campaign to celebrate the nation’s fathers did not meet

 with the same enthusiasm.  On July 5, 1908, a West Virginia church

sponsored the nation’s first event explicitly in honor of fathers,

a Sunday sermon in memory of the 362 men who had died

in the previous December’s explosions at the Fairmont Coal

Company mines in Monongah, but it was a one-time commemoration

and not an annual holiday. The next year, a Spokane, Washington

woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, one of six children raised

by a widower, tried to establish an official equivalent to

Mother’s Day for male parents. She went to local churches, the

YMCA, shopkeepers and government officials to drum up

support for her idea, and she was successful:

Washington State celebrated the nation’s first statewide

Father’s Day on July 19, 1910.

  

Slowly, the holiday spread.  In 1916, President Wilson honored the

day by using telegraph signals to unfurl a flag in Spokane

when he pressed a button in Washington, D.C.

In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge urged state governments

to observe Father’s Day.   However, many men continued to disdain the day.

Father's Day: Controversy and Commercialism

During the 1920s and 1930s, a movement arose to scrap

Mother’s Day and Father’s Day altogether in favor of a single holiday,

Parents’ Day. When World War II began, advertisers began to argue

 that celebrating Father’s Day was a way to honor American

troops and support the war effort.  By the end of the war, Father’s Day

may not have been a federal holiday, but it was a national institution.

In 1972, in the middle of a hard-fought presidential re-election

campaign, Richard Nixon signed a proclamation making

Father’s Day a federal holiday at last.  Today, economists estimate

that Americans spend more than $1 billion each year on Father’s Day gifts.

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY TO MY DAD &

TO EVER GREAT DAD.

ENJOY YOUR SPECIAL DAY!