Send your praise to Dad!


Sunday 15 June 2003

Sonora wanted a special day to honor her father, William Smart. Smart, who was a Civil War veteran, was widowed when his wife died while giving birth to their sixth child. Mr. Smart was left to raise the newborn and his other five children by himself on a rural farm in eastern Washington state.

After Sonora became an adult she realized the selflessness her father had shown in raising his children as a single parent. It was her father that made all the parental sacrifices and was, in the eyes of his daughter, a courageous, selfless, and loving man. Sonora's father was born in June, so she chose to hold the first Father's Day celebration in Spokane, Washington on the 19th of June, 1910.

Even before Dodd, however, the idea of observing a day in honor of fathers was promoted. Dr. Robert Webb conducted what is believed as the first Father's Day service at the Central Church of Fairmont, West Virginia in 1908. It was Dodd's efforts, however, that eventually led to a national observance.

President Calvin Coolidge, in 1924, supported the idea of a national Father's Day. Then in 1966 President Lyndon Johnson signed a presidential proclamation declaring the 3rd Sunday of June as Father's Day.

QUOTES ABOUT DAD

"A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again." -- Enid Bagnold

"It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all." -- Alice Walker

"None of you can ever be proud enough of being the child of SUCH a Father who has not his equal in this world-so great, so good, so faultless. Try, all of you, to follow in his footsteps and don't be discouraged, for to be really in everything like him none of you, I am sure, will ever be. Try, therefore, to be like him in some points, and you will have acquired a great deal." -- Victoria, Queen of England

"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

"To be a successful father . . . there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years." -- Ernest Hemingway

"A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father." -- Gabriel García Márquez

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

"I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example." -- Mario Cuomo

"Be kind to thy father, for when thou wert young,
Who loved thee so fondly as he?
He caught the first accents that fell from thy tongue,
And joined in thy innocent glee."
-- Margaret Courtney

"If the new American father feels bewildered and even defeated, let him take comfort from the fact that whatever he does in any fathering situation has a fifty percent chance of being right." -- Bill Cosby

"Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father!" -- Lydia M. Child

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