It may seem a little anticlimactic to its counterpart, which trumps it on the calendar by a little more than a month every year\u2014but in terms of its fiscal clout, Father\u2019s Day more than holds its own. The National Retail Federation, which says Americans spend more than $10 billion on Mom every second Sunday in May, reported that Father\u2019s Day was nearly neck-and-neck in 2008, with a $9.6 billion expenditure. The group reported that things probably won\u2019t change all that much on this year\u2019s big day, Sunday, June 21. And to boot, Father\u2019s Day is the nation\u2019s fifth largest generator of greeting cards, with about 105 million expected to change hands in 2009. Amid all the hoopla\u2014and as a testament to the country\u2019s quest for gender equality\u2014two things render Father\u2019s Day strikingly similar to its opposite number, by most accounts: It was initially conceived only a year after the first Mother\u2019s Day fete, and it was spearheaded by a woman. William Jackson Smart, a Confederacy veteran of the Civil War, found himself in a world of hurt just before the dawn of the 20th century. His wife would die in childbirth with Marshall, the couple\u2019s sixth child, leaving daughter Sonora, 16, to help raise the family. Smart\u2019s only daughter, a Jenny Lind, Ark. native, was an exemplar to moms everywhere as she sat at a 1909 Mother\u2019s Day service in Spokane, Wash., where the family had relocated after the war\u2014not ironically, the sermon centered on family life and the motherly sacrifices that kept it intact. Sonora held her dad in especially high esteem, so much so that she felt a complementary day of recognition was in order. Accordingly, William got what he deserved on June 19, 1910, with Spokane the site of the first Father\u2019s Day celebration. Inspired, Sonora took things further, requesting that June 5 (her father\u2019s birthday) be the yearly benchmark for this new day of honor. A group of Spokane clergymen compromised, deciding on the third Sunday in June. From there, a national campaign for the day was favorably received at the popular level. “Too much emphasis,” former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan wrote to Sonora (now Mrs. John Dodd), “cannot be placed upon the relation between parent and child.” While Bryan\u2019s words carried a certain weight, Congress balked at the call for an official Father\u2019s Day proclamation amid the potential for unfortunate appearances. Good ol\u2019 boy networks come and go, but this holiday was quickly gaining acceptance, and the all-male Legislature chose discretion as the better part of its valor. President Coolidge declared to the nation\u2019s governors in 1924 that “[T]he widespread observance of [Father\u2019s Day] is calculated to establish more intimate relations between fathers and their \u00adchildren.\u2026” And Congress recognized Father\u2019s Day through a joint resolution in 1956. Still, no national observance was forthcoming, prompting Maine\u2019s Sen. Margaret Chase Smith to assail a sluggish Legislature. “[T]o single out just one of our two parents and omit the other,” she wrote in 1957, “is the most grievous insult \u00adimaginable.” In 1972, President Nixon instituted a national Father\u2019s Day observance, ending decades of indecision\u2014and the cool thing is that Dodd lived to see it. She died six years later at age 96, easily old enough to have experienced television\u2019s treatment of fathers as central figures in their own rights. Widowers Steve Douglas on My Three Sons and Tom Corbett in The Courtship of Eddie\u2019s Father; Charles Ingalls, Little House on the Prairie\u2019s pile-driving farmer and steadfast family man; curmudgeon Archie Bunker from the iconic All in the Family: These guys came into their own on either side of Nixon\u2019s seminal proclamation, and it\u2019s probably no coincidence they did. Fathers are integral to the family unit, their colossal obligations met with equally monumental rewards. Indeed, Sonora Dodd spoke for the masses, even as her affections rested in only one dad\u2019s heart.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It may seem a little anticlimactic to its counterpart, which trumps it on the calendar by a little more than a month every year\u2014but in terms of its fiscal clout, Father\u2019s Day more than holds its own. The National Retail Federation, which says Americans spend more than $10 billion on Mom every second Sunday in […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11556","_seopress_titles_title":"In dollars and sentiments, Father's Day is not to be outdone","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11549,11556,11593],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-entertainment","category-downtown-news","category-no-images"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298700\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}