KGMI News
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) – This Father’s Day, Betsy Roddy will write two cards: one to her dad, and the other to her late great-grandmother, Sonora Smart Dodd.
Dodd is the Mother of Father’s Day, the woman who launched the celebration in 1910 in her hometown of Spokane.
Roddy, who is Dodd’s last direct descendant, says inspiration came to her great-grandmother as she sat through a Mother’s Day sermon in 1909, wondering why there was no Father’s Day.
After the first celebration, Dodd lobbied for decades to make Father’s Day an official federal holiday. President Richard Nixon did so in 1972.
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