Best Dad Ever

Father's Day began with a daughter. Sonora Smart Dodd's mother died in childbirth in 1898, when Sonora was sixteen, and her father, William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran, helped raise the children in Washington State. After a Mother's Day sermon, she asked why fathers had no day of their own.

The first observance was held in Spokane on June 19, 1910, the third Sunday of June. In 1916 Woodrow Wilson sent a telegram praising Spokane's Father's Day services. Lyndon Johnson proclaimed the day in 1966, and in 1972 Richard Nixon made the observance permanent on the third Sunday in June. It took sixty-two years to get from that first service to a fixed place on the national calendar.

The print says it in three words. BEST in red, DAD in white, EVER in blue, each ending in a period followed by a small heart in the same color, all in a classic serif on a warm cream ground. The white word is the quietest of the three, almost the color of the paper, so the middle word is the one the eye has to work for.