Dictionary For Dads

Father's Day is celebrated on the 3rd Sunday of June in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Father's Day was made a National Holiday in 1966. However, Father's Day in Australia and New Zealand is on the first Sunday of September.

The first known celebration of Father's Day was on July 5, 1908 in Fairmont, West Virginia, where it was commemorated at William Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church South – now known as Central United Methodist Church. Grace Golden Clayton is believed to have suggested it to her pastor after a deadly explosion in nearby Monongah in December, killing 361 men.

It was also during a sermon in 1909 that Sonora Smart Dodd became inspired by Mother's Day. After the death of her mother, Sonora and her siblings were raised by their father William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran. Sonora wanted to show how thankful she was to her father and, because William was born in June, she worked to have the first Father's Day celebrated on June 19, 1910.

In 1924 President Coolidge recommended that Father's Day become a National Holiday "to establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children and to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations".

President Johnson designated the third Sunday in June to Father's Day in 1966, but it wasn't until 1972 that President Nixon instituted Father's Day as a national observance.

• My dad has always taught me these two words: Care and Share. That's why we put on clinics. The only thing I can do is try to give back.
  - Tiger Woods

• How true Daddy's words were when he said: "All children must look after their own upbringing." Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

• If a son is uneducated, his dad is to blame. - Chinese Proverb

• He didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.  ~Clarence Budington Kelland

• My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard.  Mother would come out and say, "You're tearing up the grass."  "We're not raising grass," Dad would reply.  "We're raising boys."  ~Harmon Killebrew

• One father is more than a hundred Schoolmasters.  ~George Herbert, Outlandish Proverbs, 1640

• Father! - to God himself we cannot give a holier name.  ~William Wordsworth

• Henry James once defined life as that predicament which precedes death, and certainly nobody owes you a debt of honor or gratitude for getting him into that predicament.  But a child does owe his father a debt, if Dad, having gotten him into this peck of trouble, takes off his coat and buckles down to the job of showing his son how best to crash through it.  ~Clarence Budington Kelland

• A father is always making his baby into a little woman.  And when she is a woman he turns her back again.  ~Enid Bagnold

• Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father!  ~Lydia M. Child, Philothea: A Romance, 1836

• It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.  ~Johann Schiller

• A father carries pictures where his money used to be.  ~Author Unknown

• When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.  But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.  ~Mark Twain, "Old Times on the Mississippi" Atlantic Monthly, 1874

• Dad, you're someone to look up to no matter how tall I've grown.  ~Author Unknown

• It kills you to see them grow up.  But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.  ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

• It would seem that something which means poverty, disorder and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge.  ~Phyllis Diller

• The greatest gift I ever had  came from God; I call him Dad!

~Author Unknown

• Never raise your hand to your kids.  It leaves your groin unprotected.  ~Red Buttons

• I don't care how poor a man is; if he has family, he's rich.  ~M*A*S*H, Colonel Potter

• Dad, your guiding hand on my shoulder will remain with me forever.  ~Author Unknown

• Spread the diaper in the position of the diamond with you at bat.  Then fold second base down to home and set the baby on the pitcher's mound.  Put first base and third together, bring up home plate and pin the three together.  Of course, in case of rain, you gotta call the game and start all over again.  ~Jimmy Piersal, on how to diaper a baby, 1968