Betsy Roddy’s family used to send a Father’s Day card each year to her great-grandmother, Sonora Dodd. The unusual practice seemed an obvious tradition to her family: Dodd invented Father’s Day.
It was 1909 when Dodd suggested at a Mother’s Day church sermon that dads should have their day too.
Dodd and her five siblings were raised by their father after their mother died in childbirth. Dodd’s dedication to her father led to a decades-long fight for Father’s Day to become a national holiday, which happened in 1972, six years before Dodd died at age 96.
