Picture it. It is 1909, just five years before President Woodrow Wilson would sign a national observance of Mother’s Day into effect. Several states had been celebrating Mother’s Day for years, and while listening to a sermon about the day, young Sonora Smart Dodd wondered why no day had been set aside for fathers. Her own father had raised her and her siblings single-handedly after their mother had died. There should be such a day, Dodd thought, and decided to start campaigning for one.

Dodd selected her father’s birthday, June 5, for the celebration. However, this did not give officials in her hometown of Spokane, WA, enough time to prepare. They selected the third Sunday in June, June 19, to be Father’s Day. On June 19, 1910, the first Father’s Day celebration took place in Spokane. Dodd selected the red rose as a tribute for living fathers and the white rose as a tribute for deceased fathers. Many young men wore roses to church in honor of their fathers on that day.

Dodd continued campaigning for a national observance of Father’s Day, and other towns hopped onboard, throwing their own Father’s Day celebrations. President Woodrow Wilson gave his support to the cause, speaking at Father’s Day services in Spokane in 1916. President Calvin Coolidge followed this with a call for a national observance of Father’s Day in 1924.

In spite of Dodd’s efforts, it wasn’t until 1966 that President Lyndon Johnson signed a presidential proclamation establishing the third Sunday in June as Father’s Day. President Richard Nixon made the national observance permanent in 1972.

Today, over 30 countries around the world celebrate Father’s Day. Sonora Smart Dodd would be extremely proud of how far her idea has come.