Father's Day is celebrated on the third Sunday in June. For a long time it was barely noticed. It only became a nationally recognized holiday when President Richard Nixon signed the holiday into law in 1972.
Sonora Smart Dodd was inspired to create this day to honor dads while listening to a Mother's Day sermon in 1908. She, and her siblings, had been raised by her widowed father, " A courageous, selfless, and loving man."
On the silver anniversary of the holiday Bonnie, the great-granddaughter of William Jackson Smart wrote;
"A father sat with bowed head in his aloneness. About him clung his weeping children. The winds outside threw great scarves of powdered snow against the window panes, when suddenly the last born tore himself from the group and rushed out into the storm calling for his mother. Yet even his baby voice could not penetrate the great silence that held this mother.
Hurriedly, the father gathered him back to his protection and for more than two decades, William Jackson Smart, alone, kept paternal vigilance over his motherless children.
This poignant experience in the life of Mrs. John Bruce Dodd of Spokane, Washington, who was then Sonora Louise Smart, was the inspiration for Fathers' Day which materialized through the devotion of this father and the father of her own son, John Bruce Jr., born in 1909. Through the observance of the love and the sacrifice of fathers about her everywhere, her idea of Fathers' Day crystallized in 1910, through a formal Fathers' Day petition asking recognition of fatherhood."
Fathering is important for each of us, whether it be from a biological or step-dad, or from an official or unofficial uncle or other male figure who takes the time to love and guide us towards the steps of our path
.G_d bless our Dads!
