Founder’s family keeps history of Father’s Day alive
LOS ANGELES — This Father’s
Day, Betsy Roddy will write two cards: one to her dad, and the other to her late great-grandmother, Sonora Smart Dodd.
The second card is a century-old family tradition honoring the Mother of Father’s Day.
It’s a tradition Dodd decided to start as she sat in a Spokane, Washington, church on Mother’s Day 1909, listening to a sermon about Mother’s Day.
“And it bugged her,” Dodd’s great-granddaughter recalled. “She thought, ‘Well, why isn’t there a Father’s Day?”
Dodd and her five younger brothers had been raised by their father after their mother died in childbirth in1898.
William Jackson Smart became a farmer after fighting in the Civil War. He held down both parental roles with “leadership and love,” his daughter always said, and she believed he ought to get some credit.
“So she worked tirelessly with the local clergy and got the YWCA on board, and they had their first Father’s Day in Spokane in 1910,” said Roddy.
Although that story predicted the celebration would go nationwide by the next year, Father’s Day was slow to catch on. Dodd spent the next 62 years lobbying everyone from presidents to retailers for support.
Finally, in 1972, President Richard Nixon declared the third Sunday of June a federal holiday honoring dads. Dodd, who died in 1978, had lived to see her dream come true.
The only child of an only child and recently widowed after 24 years of marriage, Roddy never had children of her own. That not only leaves her with the title of Great-granddaughter of Father’s Day but also assures she is the last direct descendant of the holiday’s creator.
Although she’s always been well aware of that legacy, she’s never talked about it publicly until now.
She began to get more involved after Myheritage.com asked if she knew her family’s story.
Learning that she did, Myheritage dug up historical documents about Dodd that Roddy says even she and her mother didn’t know existed. They are considering eventually turning over some of their artifacts to a museum.