Dorothy Brush "Random Thoughts" Published June 15, 2005

As we get older, our dads get even smarter

The other day I found a 1994 Father's Day column by Ann Landers. All these years I had saved these words of an unknown author titled simply "My Father."

When I was:

4 years old: My daddy can do anything.

5 years old: My daddy knows a whole lot.

6 years old: My dad is smarter than your dad.

8 years old: My dad doesn't know exactly everything.

10 years old: In the olden days when my dad grew up, things were sure different.

12 years old: Oh, well, naturally, dad doesn't know anything about that. He is too old to remember his childhood.

14 years old: Don't pay any attention to my dad. He is so old-fashioned!

21 years old: Dad knows a little bit about it, but then he should because he has been around so long.

30 years old: Maybe we should ask Dad what he thinks. After all, he's had a lot of experience.

35 years old: I'm not doing a single thing until I talk to Dad.

40 years old: I wonder how Dad would have handled it. He was so wise and had a world of experience.

50 years old: I'd give anything if Dad were here now so I could talk this over with him. Too bad I didn't appreciate how smart he was. I could have learned a lot from him.

***
Thanks to a woman who had a great father, we have one day set aside to praise the male parent. Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, WA was in church listening to a Mother's Day message in 1910 when she got the idea that fathers should have a day too.

Her mother had died at an early age leaving Sonora and her five brothers. They were raised by their father, William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran. She realized what a great parent he had been filling the role of both mother and father.

She wasted no time and in just over a month she had gotten support from ministers and the public. On June 19, 1910 Spokane observed the first Father's Day. Newspapers across the country told the story and many communities adopted the idea.

The movement to give fathers official national recognition languished for 62 years. Periodically the idea would be debated in Congress and then be put aside In 1957, Senator Margaret Chase Smith pushed for recognition and chided Congress. She wrote, "Either we honor both our parents, mother and father, or let us desist from honoring either one. To single out just one of our parents and omit the other is the most grievous insult imaginable."

Father's Day was observed annually across the nation but it did not receive official recognition until 1972 when President Richard Nixon proclaimed it should become a permanent part of the June calendar.

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Dorothy Copus Brush is a Fairfield Glade resident and Crossville Chronicle staffwriter whose column is published each Wednesday.