It may seem a little anticlimactic to its counterpart, which trumps it on the calendar by a little more than a month every year—but in terms of its fiscal clout, Father’s 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’s Day was nearly neck-and-neck in 2008, with a $9.6 billion expenditure. The group reported that things probably won’t change all that much on this year’s big day, Sunday, June 21. And to boot, Father’s Day is the nation’s fifth largest generator of greeting cards, with about 105 million expected to change hands in 2009. Amid all the hoopla—and as a testament to the country’s quest for gender equality—two things render Father’s Day strikingly similar to its opposite number, by most accounts: It was initially conceived only a year after the first Mother’s 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’s sixth child, leaving daughter Sonora, 16, to help raise the family. Smart’s only daughter, a Jenny Lind, Ark. native, was an exemplar to moms everywhere as she sat at a 1909 Mother’s Day service in Spokane, Wash., where the family had relocated after the war—not 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’s Day celebration. Inspired, Sonora took things further, requesting that June 5 (her father’s 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’s words carried a certain weight, Congress balked at the call for an official Father’s Day proclamation amid the potential for unfortunate appearances. Good ol’ 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’s governors in 1924 that “[T]he widespread observance of [Father’s Day] is calculated to establish more intimate relations between fathers and their ­children.…” And Congress recognized Father’s Day through a joint resolution in 1956. Still, no national observance was forthcoming, prompting Maine’s 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 ­imaginable.” In 1972, President Nixon instituted a national Father’s Day observance, ending decades of indecision—and 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’s 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’s Father; Charles Ingalls, Little House on the Prairie’s 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’s seminal proclamation, and it’s 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’s heart.