Girl Dad

The first Father's Day was a daughter's idea. Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington, came up with it after hearing a Mother's Day sermon, and she had one father in mind: William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran who raised her and her brothers largely on his own after their mother died in childbirth.

Spokane held the first celebration on June 19, 1910. Lyndon Johnson proclaimed the day in 1966, and Richard Nixon made it a permanent national holiday in 1972.

The picture is the other half of that story: a girl on her father's shoulders, the best seat at any parade or fireworks show, from which the whole crowd is below her.

A man stands square to the viewer in dark silhouette with a small child on his shoulders, her arms thrown up in a V. Behind them a gold sun throws gouged, scratchy rays across the cream ground, in the heavy cut-line look of a woodblock. GIRL curves over the top in navy capitals, and DAD sits like a base at the bottom in thick slab letters.