Happy Father's Day

Father’s Day is observed for the first time June 19 at
Spokane, Washington, where the local YMCA and the
Spokane Ministerial Association have persuaded the city
fathers to set aside a Sunday to "honor thy father." The
idea has come from local housewife Mrs. John Bruce
Dodd, 28, who has been inspired by the selflessness
and responsibility of her father William Smart, a Civil
War veteran who raised his daughter and her five
brothers after the early death of his wife.

In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed the
third Sunday in June as Father's Day. Roses are the
Father's Day flowers: red to be worn for a living
father and white if the father has died.

This is a pain I mostly hide,
but ties of blood, or seed endure,
and even now I feel inside
the hunger for his outstretched hand,
a man’s embrace to take me in,
the need for just a word of praise.
Jimmy Carter (b. 1924), U.S. president. "I Wanted to Share
My Father’s World," Always a Reckoning, Times Books (1994).

A man knows when he is growing old because
he begins to look like his father.
Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1928), Colombian writer.
Love in the Time of Cholera (1985; tr. 1988).

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 (b. 1932), U.S. Democratic politician. Commenting on
his father, in address, 16 July 1984, to the Democratic National Convention.

It doesn’t matter who my father was;
it matters who I remember he was.
Anne Sexton (1928–1974), U.S. poet. The Poet’s Story,
"A Small Journal" (ed. by Howard Moss, 1974), entry for 1 Jan. 1972.

A father is always making his baby into a little woman.
And when she is a woman he turns her back again.
Enid Bagnold (1889–1981), British novelist, playwright. Autobiography, ch. 4 (1969).

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong
as the need for a father’s protection.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Austrian psychiatrist. Civilization and Its Discontents
(1931; repr. in Complete Works, vol. 21, ed. by James Strachey and Anna Freud, 1961).

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 (b. 1937), U.S. comedian, actor. Fatherhood, ch. 5 (1986).

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