Poems For Sons

Father's Day: Its Origin, Its Meaning

The cynics among us tend to assume that Father's Day is a creation of greeting card companies and retailers seeking to drum up sales. In fact, it originated in the efforts of two American women over a century ago.

Grace Golden Clayton organized the first Father's Day, a one-time event on July 5, 1908 to honour and remember the 362 workers, many of them Italian immigrants, who died the previous December in the infamous Monongah Mining disaster in West Virginia. She is quoted to have said, "It was partly the explosion that got me to thinking how important and loved most fathers are. All those lonely children and those heart-broken wives and mothers, made orphans and widows in a matter of a few minutes." The mine explosion was one of the deadliest industrial accidents in American history, leaving 260 widows and more than 1,000 children without fathers.

However, Sonora Smart Dodd from Spokane, Washington is most commonly credited as the founder of Father's Day. A church sermon about the newly recognized Mother's Day inspired Dodd to lobby local churches to celebrate a Father's Day in June 1910. She had deeply respected and admired her father, a widowed American Civil War veteran who kept his family together after his wife's death in childbirth, raising his five young sons as a single parent on a rural farm with her help.

Spurred by Dodd's concerted efforts over several decades, the 1910 celebration in Spokane spread to other cities across the U.S. Unlike the founder of Mother's Day, Anna Jarvis, who battled against the commercialization of Mother's Day, Dodd supported the National Council for the Promotion of Father's Day, an association of menswear retailers and trade groups that was formed in the 1930s to market the holiday and lobby for its official recognition. Eventually a 1966 presidential proclamation declared the third Sunday of June as Father's Day, which was followed in 1972 by a congressional resolution establishing the permanent national observance of the holiday in the U.S., which led to its adoption in Canada.

Wriggling free

For me, the holiday has never been one about the stereotypical cards, neckties, and sporting good gifts. While I was growing up, my family's celebration of Father's Day was in the same spirit as the day of remembrance that Grace Golden Clinton had envisioned, a time to remember and mourn the parent we'd lost to cancer.

Our mother would drive us out to Burnaby to put flowers at his grave, then we'd have a subdued lunch at a noodle or congee restaurant somewhere along the route home. During the drive to and from the cemetery, I'd think about my father, compare him to the other fathers I knew, absent or present, distant or involved, cold or affectionate. I'd examine and re-examine the fragmented memories of my few interactions with my dad while I was the typical self-absorbed pre-teen -- the one time I inadvertently told him to "shut-up" when he was trying to talk to me, occasions where I struggled frantically out of his grip when he tried to teach me to swim on my back, all the silences and missed opportunities to have a real conversation.

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