Spirits and Ties: The Real History of Father’s Day

Mother’s Day took off almost immediately. Father’s Day took more than six decades to become official, and for years a lot of Americans treated it as a punchline. Here’s how it happened.

A memorial in West Virginia

On December 6, 1907, explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company mines in Monongah, West Virginia, killed 362 men, the worst mining disaster in American history. The next summer, a woman named Grace Golden Clayton, who had lost her own father, asked her pastor at Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church South in nearby Fairmont to hold a service honoring fathers. It took place on July 5, 1908. It was a one-time memorial and didn’t catch on, partly because it was overshadowed by the Fourth of July and by other news, but it’s generally considered the first Father’s Day observance in the U.S.

Sonora Smart Dodd

The holiday as we know it came from Spokane, Washington. Sonora Smart Dodd’s mother died in childbirth in 1898, leaving her father, William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran and farmer, to raise six children on his own. In 1909, sitting through a Mother’s Day sermon, Dodd decided fathers deserved a day too. She wanted it on her father’s birthday, June 5, but local ministers needed more time to prepare sermons, so the first Spokane Father’s Day was held on June 19, 1910, the third Sunday in June. Young men wore roses: red for a living father, white for one who had died.

Decades of eye-rolling

The idea spread, but slowly. Many men scoffed at a holiday that seemed sentimental, and others saw it as a scheme to sell more stuff, just like Mother’s Day, whose own founder came to hate its commercialization. Newspaper cartoonists had fun with it. President Woodrow Wilson praised the Spokane celebration in 1916, and President Calvin Coolidge urged states to observe it in 1924, but neither made it official.

Ironically, commerce is what kept it alive. In the 1930s, a group of New York menswear retailers formed the Father’s Day Council to promote the holiday, which, not coincidentally, called for giving dad a tie or a new shirt. That’s where the necktie tradition comes from. During World War II, Father’s Day was promoted as a way to honor fathers serving overseas.

President Lyndon Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation of Father’s Day in 1966. In 1972, President Richard Nixon signed a law making the third Sunday in June a permanent national observance, 62 years after Dodd’s first celebration. She lived to see it. She died in 1978.

Father’s Day around the world

• Italy, Spain, and Portugal celebrate on March 19, the feast of St. Joseph, Jesus’s earthly father.
• Germany has Vatertag, on Ascension Day in the spring, when groups of men famously go on hikes pulling wagons loaded with beer.
• Thailand celebrated on December 5, the birthday of the late King Bhumibol, for decades.
• Australia and New Zealand mark it on the first Sunday in September, in their spring.
• Many countries, including the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., use the third Sunday in June.

A drink for Dad

Skip the tie. If your dad likes a drink, make him the one cocktail almost every dad appreciates, done right.

For the TV dads we grew up with and the cocktails a bartender and ChatGPT made for them, listen to our Father’s Day episode below.

Listen to the episode

“Going out for milk with Zech Williams” is Season 1, Episode 5 of Drinking With Robots. Rob talks fatherhood and favorite TV dads with Zech Williams of Craften Food Hall in Knightdale, North Carolina. Listen above, on Buzzsprout, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Drinking With Robots is sponsored by Remedy Cocktail Company, makers of handcrafted cocktail bitters.