It starts out small. A card put away in a kitchen drawer after the Sunday barbecue is over. Then another one in June of the next year. Next came a shoebox. Then there were three shoeboxes, and it felt more and more wrong to throw any of them away.
This is how most card collections start, but Father’s Day collections are the most important. The history of the holiday is complicated. It was pushed for by Sonora Smart Dodd and other churches and civic groups in Spokane in 1910 as a way to honor her father, who raised six children by himself after their mother died. It didn’t become a permanent holiday until Nixon signed the proclamation in 1972. For a tradition to simmer for 62 years before it finally boils is a long time. But behind the scenes, people were already making rituals out of it.
It’s interesting to see how those rituals turned into more than just feelings. A small but real collector’s market has grown up around old Father’s Day cards, especially those from the 1920s to the 1960s. It tells you a lot about what fathers were supposed to be like at any given time. Early cards had a lot of fishing rods and rocking chairs on them. By the decades after World War II, the golf club had become almost religiously common. There were cars there. Pipes. It was a vague idea of male leisure that, looking back, seems both true and a little silly.
It seems like these cards showed more than just love; they showed what a family wanted their father to be like, even though the man himself had never held a golf club. Collectors are interested in that space between the perfect picture on the card and the real Sunday afternoon it was meant to represent.
Father’s Day cards that have been passed down through three or four generations are often not something that the family set out to collect. The habit built up on its own. A grandmother keeps the cards her husband sent her. Her daughter will get them. When the granddaughter opens the box in the afternoon, she finds herself holding each June Sunday for the past eighty years. When that happens, it’s hard not to feel something. It’s not nostalgia, because many of the fathers shown are strangers now, but it’s more like recognition. It’s always been important to honor fathers, even before there was a federal holiday to do it.
There has always been something a little off about the business side of Father’s Day. Father’s Day was thought to be made up by the greeting card industry for decades, which wasn’t entirely unfair. Mother’s Day, on the other hand, became more emotionally accepted more quickly. Around the middle of the 20th century, advertising campaigns helped make ties, gadgets, and cards the most common way to show appreciation. Still, those fake gestures turned into real ones over time. People might put a card they picked up quickly at a drugstore in 1954 in an archival sleeve today, not because of how much it cost but because of who signed it and the year.
It’s possible that these collections don’t really hold on to the holiday, but rather proof that someone took a moment on a June Sunday to say something nice to their dad. Betsy Roddy, who is the last direct descendant of Sonora Smart Dodd, recently admitted that she didn’t think much about Father’s Day as a child because she thought her family’s traditions were just that. When collectors look back, they probably feel the same way. It felt like the cards were normal at the time. They no longer do.
It’s not really clear if the market for old Father’s Day items will continue to grow. Paper goods are easily broken, are often scattered by estates, and aren’t as important to auction houses as more valuable collectibles. But for the families that have kept them for generations, it was never really about how much they were worth on the market. It was about the drawer. A box for shoes. The silent choice, made every June, not to throw something away.
