Dedicated to all Fathers on This Special Father's Day '6TH of JUNE 2010'
Also to All Military Fathers, esp. to those away from their love ones
this Special Father's Day, 06/20/10
~*`THE HISTORY OF FATHER'S DAY`*~
Every year, the third Sunday in June is Father's Day in the U.S.,
and the Encyclopedia Britannica cites Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Wash.
as the founder.
It's said that Dodd first had the idea in 1909 while listening to a sermon
about Mother's Day, which was becoming popular at the time.
Dodd's father, a Civil War veteran, raised her and her five siblings
after their mother died in childbirth.
For the first celebration, in 1910, Dodd chose June 19, because her
father's birthday was the same month.
Father's Day became official in 1966, when President Lyndon B. Johnson
signed a presidential proclamation.
In 1972, President Richard Nixon established the third Sunday in June
as the permanent national observance day.
"A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman
he turns her back again." -- Enid Bagnold
"It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures;
by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all." -- Alice Walker
"None of you can ever be proud enough of being the child of SUCH a Father
who has not his equal in this world-so great, so good, so faultless. Try,
all of you, to follow in his footsteps and don't be discouraged, for to be really in everything like him none of you, I am sure, will ever be. Try, therefore, to be
like him in some points,
and you will have acquired a great deal." -- Victoria, Queen of England
"That is the thankless position of the father in the family-the provider for all,
and the enemy of all." -- J. August Strindberg
"It is a wise father that knows his own child." -- William Shakespeare
"It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was." -- Anne Sexton
"One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters." -- English Proverb
"To be a successful father . . . there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid,
don't look at it for the first two years." -- Ernest Hemingway
"A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father." -- Gabriel García Márquez
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
"I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work fifteen and sixteen
hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet,
a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language,
who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence
of his example." -- Mario Cuomo
"Be kind to thy father, for when thou wert young,
Who loved thee so fondly as he?
He caught the first accents that fell from thy tongue,
And joined in thy innocent glee."
-- Margaret Courtney
"If the new American father feels bewildered and even defeated, let him take comfort
from the fact that whatever he does in any fathering situation has a fifty percent chance
of being right." -- Bill Cosby
"Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father!" -- Lydia M. Child
