The campaign to celebrate the nation’s
fathers did not meet with enthusiasm--perhaps because, as one florist
explained, “fathers haven’t the same sentimental appeal that mothers have.” On
July 5, 1908, a West Virginia church sponsored the nation’s first event
explicitly in honor of fathers, a Sunday sermon in memory of the 362 men who
had died in the previous December’s explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company
mines in Monongah. The next year, a Spokane, Washington, one of six children
raised by a widower, tried to establish an official equivalent to Mother’s Day
for male parents. She went to local churches, the YMCA, shopkeepers and
government officials to drum up support for her idea, and she was successful:
Washington State celebrated the nation’s first statewide Father’s Day on July
19, 1910.
During the 1920s and 1930s, a movement
arose to scrap Mother’s Day and Father’s Day altogether in favor of a single
holiday, Parents’ Day. Paradoxically, however, the Depression derailed this
effort to combine and de-commercialize the holidays. Struggling retailers and
advertisers redoubled their efforts to make Father’s Day a “second Christmas”
for men, promoting goods such as neckties, hats, socks, pipes and tobacco, golf
clubs and other sporting goods, and greeting cards. When World War II began,
advertisers began to argue that celebrating Father’s Day was a way to honor
American troops and support the war effort.
In 1972, in the middle of a hard-fought
presidential re-election campaign, Richard Nixon signed a proclamation making
Father’s Day a federal holiday at last.
Today, economists estimate that Americans spend more than $1 billion
each year on Father’s Day gifts.
However, many men, including my father,
continued to disdain the day. They “scoffed at the holiday’s sentimental
attempts to domesticate manliness with flowers and gift-giving, or they derided
the proliferation of such holidays as a commercial gimmick to sell more
products--often paid for by the father himself.” (see HistoryChanel.com)
My father, Ward Ely Morehouse, died on
June 30th, 2012, six years ago.
I was not there when he died. He
was swimming in his favorite New England pond when he suffered a massive heart
attack. The paramedics revived his heart
but he was in a coma and died twelve hours later. I have shared with you before that I was in
Yellowstone NP the day he died, and, at the precise moment he was having his
heart attack I told Frances to pull over the car so I could jump bidden by
some unseen force into the glacier
lake. Only latter would I learn that the
urge to jump into the water happened at the moment he was leaving this earth.
My father was a noble and complex
man. Like so many of his generation he
was emotionally distant, which is not to say that he didn’t feel, he did,
deeply and often with tears. He just
didn’t express those feelings often, preferring a stoic response to life. And for good reason, a child of the Great
Depression, his father was often absent as a wayward Academic and his mother,
my grandmother, who suffered from debilitating depression, was often
institutionalized. My father learned
early on that emotions were best kept to oneself. I am not like my father in that regard. I express myself openly – sometimes a little
too openly from time to time. I have
also been tempered by living with six daughters and my beloved spouse. Secrets are not part of our family system.
But despite his distance, he gave me the
wisdom of virtues, seen and unseen.
Honesty, optimism, loyalty, hard work, vision and flexibility. In honor of my father and all fathers, those
biological and those who have held the role, embrace the best lessons you learned and pass them on.
With Grace and Grit, John
