A Place in the Sun

The Legacy of Sonora Smart Dodd and the Quiet Rebellion of Fatherhood

In the cathedral of memory, certain moments crystallize like dew on morning grass: luminous, fragile, transformative. For Sonora Smart Dodd, that moment arrived in May 1909, nestled within the familiar embrace of her Spokane church. The Mother’s Day sermon washed over the congregation like amber light through stained glass, yet for her, it illuminated not presence but absence—a hollow space where recognition should have bloomed.

The words of the minister fell like seeds on fertile ground, but in Sonora’s heart, they sprouted into something unexpected: rebellion. Not the fierce, blazing kind that tears down walls, but the quiet, persistent rebellion of truth seeking its voice. She carried within herself the image of her father, William Jackson Smart, whose hands had learned to braid hair and mend hearts with equal tenderness after his wife’s untimely departure.

After the service, she moved through the dispersing congregation like a river finding its course, approaching the minister with the gravity of someone who had touched something sacred and refused to let it slip away unnamed.

“I like everything you have said about motherhood… but somehow, ‘father’ seems something apart. Do you not think it would be fair and fine to give father a place in the sun?”

That question held more than it asked. It held the memory of her father, William Jackson Smart. Memory is a strange cartographer, mapping territories of the heart with precision that geography cannot match. In Sonora’s internal landscape, her father’s love appeared not as grand gestures but as the steady accumulation of presence. A Union Civil War veteran, widower, and single parent to six children in rural Washington. It carried the invisible weight of breakfasts made before dawn, clothes mended without mention, and hands that soothed fevered foreheads without ceremony. He had survived the crucible of war, but his true heroism lived in the intimate spaces of daily care. There had been no medals for the patience required to teach six children the art of becoming human. There had been no medals for what he gave. No applause for his presence. But Sonora had seen it all, and that was enough to believe it mattered.

She proposed her idea to the Spokane Ministerial Alliance and the local YMCA: a day to honor fathers. She suggested June 5, her father’s birthday, though logistics eventually placed it on the third Sunday of June. On June 19, 1910, Spokane became the birthplace of a new tradition.

Churches spoke of fathers from their pulpits and opened their doors to a different kind of testimony. People wore roses: red for the living, white for the departed. Sonora herself delivered gifts to homebound fathers, threading public ritual with private tenderness. The roses were her idea, understanding that the human heart sometimes needs symbols to contain what words cannot hold. Red for the warmth of love still present. White for the luminous spaces left by those who had crossed the threshold into memory.

That first Father’s Day was local. But Sonora’s conviction wasn’t. For over sixty years, she carried the cause, not for praise, but because she had witnessed what others missed: that some fathers give everything and are never seen. She understood the silence many men lived inside and wanted to give it language.

“The object of this day,” she later said, “is to bring other father and child, and to give to the head of the house and the earner of the daily bread for his brood all the respect and honor due him… to instill the same love and reverence for the father as is the mother’s portion.”

Presidents offered varying degrees of recognition: Wilson’s verbal support in 1916, like a promise whispered but not sealed. Congress’s skepticism, their dismissal of sentiment as somehow lesser than policy. Yet Sonora remained, season after season, year after year, carrying her father’s memory and her understanding of what that memory meant for all fathers who loved in the margins of recognition. The official designation came finally in 1972, under Nixon’s pen.

Two years later, Spokane honored her during Expo ’74. She was in her nineties, and the world had finally caught up to the truth she carried alone for decades.

Yet to understand Sonora Smart Dodd solely through the lens of holiday creation would be to mistake a single note for the entire symphony of her existence. She was a woman who inhabited multiple worlds simultaneously, refusing the narrow definitions her era sought to impose upon feminine possibility.

In 1937, she became vice-president and co-owner of Ball & Dodd Funeral Home, one of the only women in death care at the time. She finished her high school diploma as an adult. Studied fine arts in Chicago. Wrote ethnographies of Native communities in Washington. Sketched fashion in Hollywood. Her life refused boxes. She crossed boundaries before culture gave her permission.

She painted. Sculpted. Wrote poetry. But her deepest artistry may have been her ability to see the sacred in the ordinary, to notice what the world forgot to honor.

She didn’t imagine Father’s Day as a celebration. She imagined it as a reckoning. A pause. A space where love could be named, even if the person who gave it was gone. She knew the dead still shape us. That memory holds weight. That grief and gratitude could live in the same breath.

Her intimate knowledge of death infused her vision of Father’s Day with a depth that transcended mere celebration. She understood that love persists beyond physical presence. That recognition must encompass both the joy of connection and the sorrow of separation. The roses became vessels for this complex emotional reality: a way of acknowledging that families are shaped as much by absence as by presence. That the dead continue to parent through the persistent influence of their love.

She created space for people to honor not only living fathers, but to grieve those who had departed. To feel simultaneously the warmth of memory and the cold of loss. In this, she offered something more profound than a holiday: she offered a practice of wholeness, a way of holding the full spectrum of human experience within a single moment of recognition.

Today, her name is rarely found in textbooks. Even in Spokane, where she is buried in Greenwood Memorial Terrace, her grave has gone unkept, hidden beneath weeds and time. That forgetting is not neutral. It is the quiet erasure of a woman who dared to dignify love as labor and to dignify men who offered tenderness in a world that demanded toughness.

And maybe that forgetting says something about how we still see fatherhood.

Despite now being law, Father’s Day remains culturally muted. In 2024, Americans spent $11 billion more on Mother’s Day than Father’s Day. Stores overflowed with floral displays, cards, keepsakes. Father’s Day, by contrast, was a gift table of grilling aprons and novelty mugs. No aisle of reverence. No rows of roses.

Fathers today are still seen, largely, as second-class parents, expected to perform to earn presence, to earn love, to earn value. When men offer care, it’s often portrayed as a transformation, not a truth. As if being nurturing is an exception to their nature, not an extension of it.

Media reinforces this. Courts often still do. So do our holiday aisles.

But there’s a deeper layer worth holding. The moment Sonora asked for fathers to have a place in the sun happened in Spokane, a city whose name, given by the Spokane Tribe, means “Children of the Sun.” That detail isn’t just poetic; it’s aligned. Because in Spokane tribal culture, fatherhood was never reduced to provision. It was sacred, woven into the rhythms of life, shared across seasons, and rooted in presence. Fathers were not distant or peripheral; they were central. They hunted and protected, yes, but they also taught, tended, and told stories. They were spiritual mentors and emotional anchors, guiding their children the way the sun guides the earth: steadily, seasonally, and with reverence, even when unseen.

So when Sonora spoke those words, she wasn’t just asking for a new tradition. She was honoring what she had lived. And, perhaps without realizing it, she was also echoing something already alive in the land beneath her feet. She was aligning a modern gesture with an ancestral truth, speaking the language of legacy in the homeland of the Children of the Sun.

On this 115th anniversary, we are invited to remember not just the holiday but the daughter who gave it shape. The girl who watched a man build a life out of loss and said, this matters.

So wear a rose, red or white, but wear it knowing why. Speak the names of the men who shaped you, even imperfectly. And if you are a father, or stepfather, or mentor, this day is not just celebration. It is invitation. It is return.

Let this be a homecoming, not to nostalgia, but to presence. A refusal to forget Sonora Smart Dodd. A refusal to let fatherhood be flattened.

She didn’t just start a holiday. She unearthed a truth. And it’s ours to carry forward.

Because a few days ago, I stood before her grave in Greenwood Memorial Terrace. The stone was weathered. The earth quiet. The weeds high.

And I realized something: She’s not just being forgotten in books. She’s being forgotten in the very soil she helped sanctify.

She wrote children’s books honoring Native stories. She created art. She studied, sculpted, grieved, preserved. She saw what others missed and moved the world because of it.

And now, she’s fading.

I won’t let that happen.

Because this Father’s Day, in the homeland of the Children of the Sun, I will make space for her.

Because she, too, deserves a place in the sun.