The History of the Holiday
Father's Daywas started in 1909 by Sonora Louise Smart Dodd from Spokane, WA to honor her dad, William Smart. Dodd's mother died during childbirth with her sixth baby, leaving Smart, a Civil War veteran, to raise the kids himself. When Dodd was grown up she realized how much her father sacrificed for her and her siblings. June 19, 1910 marked the first Father's Day ever, and it was observed in Spokane, WA. Across the country other areas began to observe the holiday as well. President Lyndon B. Johnson officially declared the third Sunday in June Father's Day. - holidays.net

Fathers Day Fun Facts and Quotes
Father's Day is the fifth most popular card-sending holiday, with an estimated $100 million in card sales. Husbands, grandfathers, uncles, sons and sons-in-law are honored as well as father.

In 1900, fathers passed on clothing to their sons. Today, kids wouldn't touch Dad's clothes if they were sliding naked down an icicle.

In 1900, fathers could count on children to join the family business. Today, fathers pray their kids will soon come home from college long enough to teach them how to work the computer and set the VCR.

"That is the thankless position of the father in the family-the provider for all, and the enemy of all." -J. August Strindberg

"It is a wise father that knows his own child."
-William Shakespeare

"It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was." -Anne Sexton

"One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters." English Proverb

"My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, "You're tearing up the grass." "We're not raising grass," Dad would reply. "We're raising boys."" - -Harmon Killebrew

"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, "Old Times on the Mississippi" Atlantic Monthly, 1874

"There's something like a line of gold thread running through a man's words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself." -John Gregory Brown, Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, 1994

"It would seem that something which means poverty, disorder and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge." -Phyllis Diller

"The greatest gift I ever had came from God; I call him Dad!" -Author Unknown

"To her the name of father was another name for love." -Fanny Fern

"My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me." -Jim Valvano

"Small boys become big men through the influence of big men who care about small boys." -Anonymous

"Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance." -Ruth E. Renkel

"It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was." Anne Sexton "Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father!" -Lydia M. Child

"I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week." -Mario Cuomo

"One night a father overheard his son pray: Dear God, Make me the kind of man my Daddy is. Later that night, the Father prayed, Dear God, Make me the kind of man my son wants me to be." -Anonymous

"By profession I am a soldier and take pride in that fact. But I am prouder - infinitely prouder - to be a father. A soldier destroys in order to build; the father only builds, never destroys. The one has the potentiality of death; the other embodies creation and life. And while the hordes of death are mighty, the battalions of life are mightier still. It is my hope that my son, when I am gone, will remember me not from the battle field but in the home repeating with him our simple daily prayer, 'Our Father who art in Heaven" -Douglas Macarthur

"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -Sigmund Freud

"Father! - to God himself we cannot give a holier name." -William Wordsworth

"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
" The thing to remember about fathers is... they're men. A girl has to keep it in mind: They are dragon-seekers, bent on improbable rescues. Scratch any father, you find someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, believing change is a threat, like your first shoes with heels on, like your first bicycle... - Phyllis McGinley
" If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons. - James Baldwin
" My father hated radio and he could not wait for television to be invented so that he could hate that too. - Peter De Vries
" Life was a lot simpler when what we honored was father and mother rather than all major credit cards. - Robert Orben