No, Father's Day wasn't invented by Hallmark.
It began right here in Spokane, according to the McClatchy News Service, when Sonora Louise Smart Dodd heard a Mother's Day sermon in church in May, 1909. Her mother had died 11 years earlier and her father, William Jackson Smart, had been left to raise six children on his own. She wondered why fathers didn't have a special day on the calendar to be recognized and decided to organize one.
She approached the Spokane Ministerial Alliance for help. They chose the third Sunday in June, though Smart Dodd originally wanted it to be June 5 — her father's birthday.
The first Father's Day celebration was held in Spokane a year later on June 19, 1910. The idea spread slowly across the country and in 1966 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a presidential proclamation declaring the third Sunday of June as Father's Day.
Smart Dodd was honored at the World's Fair in Spokane in 1974. She died four years later at the age of 96.
