June 18: ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
ON THIS DAY IN 1927, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “Father is to have his innings tomorrow, when ‘Father’s Day’ is to be celebrated for the fifth time throughout the United States. Mother’s Day was accepted without question, but when Mrs. John B. Dodd of Spokane, Wash., proposed Father’s Day in 1910 everybody took it as a joke. Father was considered the wheelhorse of the family who shied at sentiment, but as the years passed and the observance of Father’s Day became more general, the true significance of the day began to sink into the national consciousness and father was honored regularly by his own special day just as mother had been for many years. At first there was confusion in dates as each community chose its own. In 1914 Congress tried to fix the first Sunday in June by a resolution, which did not help much, but in 1920 a concerted movement got under way to settle upon the third Sunday in June as Father’s Day. Red or white roses, cornflowers and dandelions are the flowers usually worn for father. Churches, theaters and organizations will honor father in various ways, with personal gifts marking the day in the family circle. The shops are blossoming out with suggestions to ‘Buy a tie for Dad,’ so at least father will not suffer for new ties even if he does shy at the selections. But in spite of jokes, supposedly brilliant poetry and good-natured gibes, Father’s Day is here as an established custom.”
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ON THIS DAY IN 1933, the Eagle reported, “Man does not live on city streets alone. As the warmth of the summer months returns each year, sifting down even among the rock-pile office buildings and apartment houses, there comes upon the city dweller the sudden urge to get away from it all — to leave streets and sidewalks, subways and hotel lobbies behind, and to move out where there is green grass and a cool white beach, mountain ridges or a shimmering, winding stream or the open sea. For civilization has been with us a comparatively brief period and in the most hardened city inhabitant the ancestral nostalgia for a return to nature is not hard to re-arouse. In these depression years, the mental strain brought on by the fight to make both ends meet more than ever makes a vacation in some form of outdoors an almost irresistible lure.”
Brooklyn Boro
View MoreNew York City’s most populous borough, Brooklyn, is home to nearly 2.6 million residents. If Brooklyn were an independent city it would be the fourth largest city in the United States. While Brooklyn has become the epitome of ‘cool and hip’ in recent years, for those that were born here, raised families here and improved communities over the years, Brooklyn has never been ‘uncool’.