"Be kind to thy father, for when thou wert young,
Who loved thee so fondly as he?
He caught the first accents that fell from thy tongue,
And joined in thy innocent glee"
-Margaret Courtney
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The first recorded tribute to fathers in the U.S. was born of heartbreaking tragedy. On December 6, 1907, 360 men were killed in a mine explosion in Monongah, West Virginia. It was the worst mine disaster in American history, 200 widows and 1,000 children were left grieving, and a Mrs Grace Golden Clayton missed her dad.
Later, she explained, "It was partly the explosion that set me to think how important and loved most fathers are. All those lonely little children and those heartbroken wives and mothers. Oh, how sad and frightening to have no father, no husband to turn to at such an awful time!"
Grace Golden Clayton implored her church to recognize fathers at a service on the Sunday closest to her own dad's birthday. They assented. "This holiday was etched in sadness as well as thankfulness," said Reverend Donal Meighen, the pastor of the Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church, on July 5,1908.
The idea apparently went nowhere until Mrs. Sonora Smart Dodd, of Creston, Washington looked to honor her civil war veteran dad, who had raised 6 kids after his wife died in childbirth. Her Father's Day was celebrated in Spokane, Washington on June 19, 1910.
In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge recommended the "widespread observance" of a Father's Day, but not that it become a national holiday. His goal was to "
establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children, and to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations."
Despite a long-standing and robust Mother's Day, not much progress was made until 1956, when Congress passed a "joint resolution" (which was both toothless and political - sound familiar?) "recognizing" a Father's Day.
Se
nator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was incensed: "
Congress has been guilty now for forty years of the worst possible oversight...against our gallant fathers. Either we honor both our parents - mother and father - or let us desist from honoring either. To single out just one of our parents and omit the other is the most grievous insult imaginable."
As was often the case, it took Lyndon Johnson to get the job done. In 1966, he decreed Father's Day should be celebrated on the 3rd Sunday of June. In 1972, Richard Nixon (our last liberal president) closed the deal and, at long last, Congress made it a permanent official holiday.
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When Daddy Babysits:
"That's my boy!"
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The Single Best Quote About Dads Ever:
"Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. " - Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities
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More of My Favorite Quotes About Dads
"Henry James once defined life as that predicament which precedes death, and certainly nobody owes you a debt of honor or gratitude for getting him into that predicament. But a child does owe his father a debt if Dad, having gotten him into this peck of trouble, takes off his coat and buckles down to the job of showing his son how best to crash through it. " - Clarence Budington Kelland
"I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example." - Mario Cuomo
"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years." - Mark Twain
"It is admirable for a man to take his son fishing, but there is a special place in heaven for the father who takes his daughter shopping." - John Sinor
Hey, Dads - Nice job!
Have a joyous Father's Day.
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