•Sonora Louise Smart Dodd, of Spokane, Washington, started the tradition of Father's Day in the honor of her dad.

•First local Father's Day was celebrated on June 19, 1910, in Spokane, Washington.

•In 1916, US President Woodrow Wilson approved the idea of observing an annual Father's Day.

•In1924, President Calvin Coolidge made Father's Day a national event.

•In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson signed a presidential proclamation declaring the 3rd Sunday of June as Father's Day.

•Father's Day is the fifth most popular card-sending holiday, with an estimated $100 million in card sales. Husbands, grandfathers, uncles, sons and sons-in-law are honored as well as father.

•It is a wise father that knows his own child. - William Shakespeare

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

•Fathers, like mothers, are not born. Men grow into fathers and fathering is a very important stage in their development. - David Gottesman

•Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father! - Lydia M. Child It is much easier to become a father than to be one. - Kent Nerburn

•By profession I am a soldier and take pride in that fact. But I am prouder - infinitely prouder - to be a father. A soldier destroys in order to build; the father only builds, never destroys. The one has the potentiality of death; the other embodies creation and life. And while the hordes of death are mighty, the battalions of life are mightier still. It is my hope that my son, when I am gone, will remember me not from the battle field but in the home repeating with him our simple daily prayer, 'Our Father who art in Heaven.' - Douglas Macarthur

•One night a father overheard his son pray: Dear God, Make me the kind of man my Daddy is. Later that night, the Father prayed, Dear God, Make me the kind of man my son wants me to be. - Anonymous

•One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters. - George Herbert

•Be kind to thy father, for when thou were 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

•It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was. - Anne Sexton

•The greatest gift I ever received come from God, I call him Dad! - Anonymous

•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

•My father died many years ago, and yet when something special happens to me, I talk to him secretly not really knowing whether he hears, but it makes me feel better to half believe it. - Josefowitz

•By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong. - Charles Wadsworth

•I've had a hard life, but my hardships are nothing against the hardships that my father went through in order to get me to where I started. - Bartrand Hubbard

•I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week. - Mario Cuomo