The Father’s Day Tie Was There Almost From the Start.

Weird history from 100 years ago – Father’s Day was still fighting to be taken seriously in the 1920s, but the gift industry had already found its angle.

Ms Kate Richardson Swineford, (later Kate Burgess), helped push the idea in Virginia, USA. In 1921 she founded the National Fathers’ Day Association, wrote letters, organised a charter, and lobbied governors to give fathers a day of recognition. She even helped shift the proposed date to the third Sunday in June.

Then, in 1933, she secured trademark status for “Fathers’ Day” from the U.S. Patent Office. Not a patent, exactly, more a trademark, but still a strange little footnote; where for a time, someone had legal protection over the very phrase itself.

The funny part is that by June 1926, long before Father’s Day became a permanent U.S. national holiday in 1972, newspapers were already full of Father’s Day gift ads. And the gift they kept pushing was the same one that became the cliché; namely “Ties”.
So the Fathers’ Day holiday began as a sincere campaign to recognise fathers. Within a few years, retailers had translated that sentiment into neckwear.

Ireland came to the modern June version later. The best evidence points to Father’s Day arriving here just after the Second World War, before becoming familiar by the 1950s. Today it falls on the third Sunday in June, the same as in the U.S. and UK, though in Ireland it is not a bank holiday.

So in the name of history, go ahead and buy Dad another tie. No, for once, maybe don’t.