FATHER'S DAY

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Father's Day was started as a reaction, or perhaps as an afterthought, to Mother's Day. Not only was the first Father's Day service held in Fairmont, West Virginia, in july 1908 (just two months after and twenty miles down the river from the first Mother's Day in Grafton), But the woman chiefly responsible for popularizing the celebration, Mrs. John Bruce of Spokane, got the idea while listening to a Mother's Day sermon. That was in 1909, and by the following year she had persuaded the Spokane city fathers to observe one Sunday in June as an official tribute to paternity. Her original choice was June 5, the birthday of her father, who had raised six children after the death of his wife, but the third Sunday proved logistically more acceptable, and so it has stayed ever since.

Although fathers were widely honored on that day beginning early in the century, and although President Wilson endorsed it as he had Mother's Day, the legal parity of the paternal holiday was slow in coming. For over sixty years, American presidents had to make annual ad hoc proclamations , for Congress was strangely reluctant- a rare instance of modesty, perhaps -to give Dad an equal, permanent footing with Mom. It wasn'tuntil 1972 that Congress established the national holiday.

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