The mines beneath Monongah, West Virginia, blew apart on the morning of December the sixth, 1907. The blast tore through the tunnels and broke airshafts, leaving three hundred and sixty-two men and boys dead by the official count. Many in those hills believed that the count was too low, for the miners took their sons and their brothers down with them to load coal, and not everyone’s name found its way into a clerk’s book. By some accounts, nearly a thousand children lost their fathers. One woman who came down as part of the relief effort called Monongah “a tragic little grey town, where sorrow meets one at every step.” That day remains the worst mining disaster in American history.
The town’s grief found its way to a minister’s daughter named Grace Golden Clayton, who had buried her own father some years before and felt the loss freshly now, watching the children who had lost theirs. She said it was partly the explosion that made her think about how loved most fathers are. So she went to her pastor and asked for a service for the fathers who had passed and for all fathers. He agreed. The date was set for the fifth of July, 1908, on the Sunday nearest Grace’s father’s birthday.
The service Grace had asked for was in part a memorial, a mourning for the Monongah fathers, held scarcely seven months after the explosion. Unfortunately, it had the ill luck to fall the day after the Fourth of July, when the town had given itself over to fireworks and celebration and had little sorrow left over for the dead. And what grief remained went elsewhere as a young woman of a prominent local family had died over that same holiday, and the shock of her passing and the funeral that followed drew off the town’s attention. That memorial for the fathers went almost unremarked.
Grace never pushed the idea further. But it was, as far as the historical record best reaches, the first known Father’s Day service in America.
The day, thus, had to be born again. In the spring of 1909, a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd sat in a Spokane, Washington church and heard a sermon for Mother’s Day, for the custom was new then and spreading through the churches.
Her mind drifted from the sermon to her own life. Her mother had died in childbirth when Sonora was sixteen, the only daughter among six children. Her father, William Jackson Smart, did not take the expected action of breaking up the family and sending the children to relatives, as a widowed man was counseled to do in those days. He kept his children and raised them on the farm, becoming part of father and mother both, his daughter said, and did so without complaint until every child was grown and gone into a home of his or her own.
Sonora went up to the pastor and said, “I like everything you have said about motherhood,” she told him, “but somehow, ‘father’ seems something apart. Do you not think it would be fair and fine to give father a place in the sun?”
That question led her to write a petition, with two men from the YMCA signing it beside her, which she brought to ministers around Spokane. She wanted the fifth of June, which was her father’s birthday, but the preachers needed time to prepare their sermons, so they set it for the third Sunday of the month.
On the sixth of June, 1910, the Spokane paper announced the day on its front page, and on Sunday the nineteenth, the preachers of that city stood up and preached fatherhood across the town. The people wore roses, red for the fathers still living and white for the fathers who had passed. Sonora Dodd rode out through the streets in a carriage with her baby beside her, carrying flowers and small gifts.
The story went out over the wires. Others, too, began to celebrate. Presidents even offered warm words. Woodrow Wilson took part in the celebration in Spokane in 1916. Calvin Coolidge commended the day in 1924.
But warm words were not law, and bills to make the holiday official kept dying in Congress. In 1957, Senator Margaret Chase Smith wrote, “Either we honor both our parents, mother and father, or let us desist from honoring either one. But to single out just one of our two parents and omit the other is the most grievous insult imaginable.” Still no bill passed. Congress finally approved the day in 1966, but only for that one year, leaving Lyndon Johnson to proclaim it. In 1972, Richard Nixon signed it into law, sixty-two years after the celebration in Spokane. Sonora Smart Dodd lived to see it all. She died in 1978 at ninety-six years old.
Sources:
* "Father's Day Is Conceived by Spokane's Sonora Smart Dodd and Celebrated for the First Time in Spokane on June 19, 1910." HistoryLink.org, 17 June 2010, www.historylink.org/File/9458.
* "Father's Day—Pic of the Week." In Custodia Legis, Library of Congress, June 2015, blogs.loc.gov/law/2015/06/fathers-day-pic-of-the-week/.
* "It Started Here: Sonora Dodd, the Spokane Mother of Father's Day." The Spokesman-Review, 18 June 2017, www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/jun/18/it-started-here-sonora-dodd-the-spokane-mother-of-/.
* Johnson, Lyndon B. “Proclamation 3730—Father’s Day, 1966.” 1966. The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-3730-fathers-day-1966.
* Kellogg, Paul U. “Monongah.” Charities and the Commons, vol. 19, 1907–08, pp. 1313–28. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/survey-1897_october-1907-april-1908_19.
* "Monongah Mine Disaster." West Virginia Archives and History, West Virginia Division of Culture and History, archive.wvculture.org/history/disasters/monongah03.html.
* "Monongah Mining Disaster of 1907." Encyclopædia Britannica, www.britannica.com/event/Monongah-mining-disaster-of-1907.
* Nixon, Richard. "Proclamation 4127—Father's Day." 1972. The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-4127-fathers-day.
