The woman who founded Father's Day was a renegade, great-granddaughter says
CTV
The late Sonora Smart Dodd launched the celebration of dads in 1910 in her hometown of Spokane, Washington. As a result, she is the one responsible for those annual gifts that run the gamut from embarrassingly silly-looking neckties to kids' finger paintings crafted with so much love by those tiny hands that they can bring a tear to the eye of even the most stoic father.
You could call her the mother of Father's Day.
The late Sonora Smart Dodd launched the celebration of dads in 1910 in her hometown of Spokane, Washington. As a result, she is the one responsible for those annual gifts that run the gamut from embarrassingly silly-looking neckties to kids' finger paintings crafted with so much love by those tiny hands that they can bring a tear to the eye of even the most stoic father.
It's a tradition Dodd decided to start as she sat in a Spokane church on Mother's Day 1909, listening to a sermon about -- what else? -- Mother's Day.
"And it bugged her," Dodd's great-granddaughter, Betsy Roddy, told The Associated Press in 2017. "She thought, 'Well, why isn't there a Father's Day?"
Dodd and her five younger brothers, after all, had been raised by their father after their mother died in childbirth in 1898.
William Jackson Smart became a farmer after fighting in the Civil War. He not only held down both parental roles but did it with "leadership and love," his daughter always said, and she believed he ought to get some credit.
"So she worked tirelessly with the local clergy and got the YWCA on board, and they had their first Father's Day in Spokane in 1910," said Roddy, displaying a copy of The River Press of Fort Benton, Montana, which reported on the event.
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