Sonora Louise Smart was born in Jenny Lind, Sebastian County, Arkansas to farmer William Jackson Smart (1842-1919) and his wife Ellen Victoria Cheek Smart (1851-1898). When Sonora was 16, her mother died in childbirth with her sixth child.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
William Smart was a sergeant in the Union"s First Arkansas Light Artillery during the Civil War. When Sonora was seven years old, the Smart family moved from Marion, Arkansas to a farm between Creston, Washington and Wilbur, Washington in 1889. Sonora Smart married John Bruce Dodd (1870-1945), one of the original founders of Ball & Dodd Funeral Home, and had a son, Jack Dodd, born in 1909.
Smart held her father in great esteem.
She approached the Spokane Ministerial Alliance and suggested her own father"s birthday, of June 5, as the day of honor for fathers. The Alliance chose the third Sunday in June instead.
The first was celebrated June 19, 1910 in Spokane, Washington. Although observance of the holiday faded in the 1920s, over time, the idea of became popular and embraced across the nation.
In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson sent a telegraph to Spokane praising services.
William Jennings Bryan was another early admirer of the observance. In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a presidential proclamation declaring the third Sunday of June as In 1972, President Nixon established a permanent national observance of to be held on the 3rd Sunday of June each year. Dodd was honored at Expo "74, the World"s Fair, in Spokane in 1974.
She died four years later at the age of ninety-six, and was buried in Greenwood Memorial Terrace in Spokane.
