THE LONG SAD JOURNEY TO FATHER'S DAY

June 17th is the day you honor your father with a garish tie that’s louder than a 747 taking off or a drunken Picasso painting. You may have already given Dad a comic card mocking him, which is what most fathers want. They don’t want that sentimental slop you told your beloved sainted mother. Fathers want a quick laugh and to go back to the game on the tube.

Father’s Day has never been the big business day that Mother’s Day is. If you think that the promotion of Father’s Day will make or break your business, then I have some GM stock I’d like to sell you. Why does the celebration of Father’s Day rank somewhere below Arbor Day in importance? Let’s go back and find out when Father’s Day really began? There’s some confusion about that. The president of Chicago’s Lion’s Club, Harry Meek (a firm believer that the Meeks shall inherit the earth) celebrated the first Father’s day with his club in 1915.

Harry picked the third Sunday in June, which was the closest date to his own birthday. That’s what a real guy would do, honor himself as a great father, without bothering to ask his wife and kids what they thought about it. Then, as fathers are wont to do, he went back to the game on the radio.
However, the most accepted view of the origins of Father’s Day goes back to 1909 when Sonora Smart Dodd was listening to a Mother’s Day church sermon and she started thinking of her father, who really raised her. She barely knew her mother, who died young giving birth to her sixth child. Her father, William Jefferson Smart, was left to raise his rambunctious brood alone.

Let’s just pause a moment for Sonora’s poor young mother….OK, her father, a Civil War vet, sacrificed a lot to raise them, so Sonora ask her Spokane minister to preach a sermon on fathers June 6th, her father’s birthday.
He couldn’t do it till June 19th. Soon the state of Washington celebrated the third Sunday in June as Father’s Day. So Father’s Day is a her-story, not a history, due to a dedicated daughter’s love for her frazzled father, who raised his kids on his own. This is something mothers do all the time, if the father is gone or too distracted to help much.

Since Sonora’s father acted like a good mother we now have Father’s Day. Way back then the children honored good old dad with a fresh baked pie, not a store bought tie.

The Father’s Day lobby (yes, there’s always a lobby) asked President Woodrow Wilson to declare an annual Father’s Day. Wilson approved the idea in 1916, but it took till 1924 for President Calvin Coolidge to make it a national event to “establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children and to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations.” Sounds like a plea to dead beat dads to me, who lose interest in their children right after conception.

But Father’s Day was only an event, like a bake sale or mud wrestling. It didn’t become official until 1966 when President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed that the third Sunday in June was Father’s Day and a great day to have a good old fashioned Texas barbecue. Lyndon was a Texan.
However, a proclamation is not a holiday, like desert isn’t dinner. In 1972, President Richard Nixon made Father’s Day a national holiday before eventually resigning due to the Watergate scandal and returning to his original title as husband and father. Between 1966 and 1972 both Presidents fought the Vietnam War, where many a father was killed.

Father’s Day was a 60 year afterthought to Mother’s day, but we fathers take what we can get. We’re thrilled to be remembered at all once a year and the silly cards and bad ties make us a little misty, but don’t tell anybody.
About the original Father’s Day pie giving tradition, cherry crumb is an excellent celebratory slice of pie. It’s tart, yet sweet and somewhat crummy. Not unlike a lot of us fathers.