Fathers do not have a same commercial appeal from florists and Chocolateers as mothers do . Men generally resist sentimentality but on July 5, 1908, a West Virginia church sponsored the nation’s first event explicitly in honor of fathers, a Sunday sermon was held in memory of the 362 men who had died in the previous December’s explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company mines in Monongah. It was to be a one-time commemoration and not an annual holiday.
The next year, a Spokane,Washington woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, one of six children raised by a widower, tried to establish an official equivalent to Mother’s Day for male parents. She made the rounds looking for support for her idea, and she was successful: Washington State celebrated the nation’s first statewide Father’s Day on June 19, 1910.
Slowly, the holiday began to spread. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson honored the day by using telegraph signals to unfurl a flag in Spokane when he pressed a button in Washington, D.C.In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge urged state governments to observe Father’s Day.
