A History of Father’s Day: From Ancient Times to Modern America

According to Hallmark this is probably the very first Father’s Day card commercially printed. What follows is their version of this holiday’s history…

Some 4,000 years ago a Babylonian boy named Elmesu may have carved the first Father’s Day card but clay.

A few thousand years later a woman named Sonora Louise Dodd was sitting in church listening to a Mother’s Day sermon. That sermon got her thinking about her dad William—a widower and Civil War veteran who had raised six kids over two decades after the death of his wife.

That got her to thinking that many dads are just as worthy as those moms being celebrated and so the Father’s Day holiday was born. The idea of Father’s Day slowly and surely began to catch on with some help from four presidents:

In 1916, Woodrow Wilson observed the day, and the momentum began.
In 1924, Calvin Coolidge signed a resolution “to establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children and to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations.”
In 1966, Lyndon Johnson signed an executive order setting an official day: the third Sunday in June.
In 1972, Richard Nixon and Congress made it an official holiday.