Why we celebrate Father’s Day on the third Sunday in June

Each year, the third Sunday in June is a time to pay homage to fathers and the millions of other men who have stepped into the role of father. While it may seem as though Father’s Day has been around forever, it didn’t become a nationally recognized holiday in the United States until 1972.

One account says Grace Golden Clayton came up with the idea in 1908 in Fairmont, West Virginia. Clayton was inspired to celebrate fathers after 362 men died in an explosion at the Fairmont Coal Company mines in Monongah in the previous December, described as the worst mining disaster in America, but it was a one-time commemoration and not an annual holiday.

The next year, a Spokane, Washington woman named Sonora Smart Dodd tried to establish an official equivalent to Mother’s Day for male parents. In 1909, while attending a Mother’s Day sermon in church, she felt fathers were equally deserving of praise. 

To honor her own father, William Smart, a Civil War veteran and widower who raised six children alone, initially petitioned for the holiday to fall on his birthday, June 5. However, the Spokane Ministerial Alliance chose the third Sunday to give ministers more time to prepare their sermons. Washington State celebrated the nation’s first statewide Father’s Day on June 19, 1910.

Slowly, the holiday began to 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.

By the 1930s, advertisers and retailers began promoting Father’s Day as a commercial holiday, encouraging people to buy gifts and cards. The National Council for the Promotion of Father’s Day helped push the holiday into wider public acceptance through marketing campaigns.

The breakthrough came when President Lyndon B. Johnson issued America’s first presidential Father’s Day proclamation in 1966, acknowledging that the third Sunday in June had for many years been observed as Father’s Day. 

“In the homes of our Nation, we look to the fathers to provide the strength and stability which characterize the successful family. If the father’s responsibilities are many, his rewards are also great—the love, appreciation, and respect of children and spouse,” he said at the signing.

In 1972, when Sonora Smart Dodd was 92 years old, President Richard Nixon signed it into law as an official national observance.