Once, when I was in college, I took off with a friend on a late-adolescent cross-country drive. The first stop was my friend’s grandfather’s house, in Westport, Connecticut, and it turned out that the guy had invented Father’s Day as we know it. He was a retired advertising man named Alvin Austin. In the nineteen-thirties, representing a consortium of menswear firms, Mr. Austin set about turning the quieter paternal holiday—which had been first proclaimed by the State of Washington in 1910, without anyone’s noticing—into a blockbuster. Pretty soon there was a lavishly publicized annual luncheon at a New York hotel during which Mr. Austin, on behalf of the National Father’s Day Committee, conferred the Father of the Year Medal on the likes of Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur. I remember being not so much impressed as disillusioned by this. Father’s Day had to be invented?
—Nicholas Lemann, “A Lament for Father’s Day,” The Talk of the Town, June 21 & 28, 1999
Cover by William Steig, from the issue of October 12, 1935.
