Once Upon a City is a weekly series that looks back at significant events, or eras, in Toronto’s history, based on reporting and photography from The Star’s archives.

Daddy’s girl got her wish. Rather quickly, as it turned out.

It was May 14, 1923 when a 10-year-old girl wrote to the Toronto Daily Star sweetly asking why there wasn’t a day to celebrate fathers.

“I am sure I love my mother very dearly and always give her flowers on Mother’s Day. Now why can’t we treat daddy the same? He works just as hard,” read the letter, signed: “Daddy’s girl.”

Sure enough, a few weeks later, the newspaper carried an ad by clothiers, Oak Halls Limited.

“Sunday is Father’s Day,” it stated bluntly. “Buy Dad a tie.”

This isn’t to suggest that Daddy’s girl got the whole celebratory ball rolling. That credit goes to Sonora Smart Dodd, one of a widower’s six children in Spokane, Wash. who organized a church tribute to dads in 1910.

Fourteen years later, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge recognized the third Sunday in June as Father’s Day and in 1972, President Richard Nixon made it a permanent national holiday for Americans.

North of the border, the idea of festivities for fathers was little more than a twinkle in the eye of one smart arse, who suggested in a 1912 newspaper item that admiration for the old guy was best expressed by wearing “a bunch of spinach.”

Indeed, the gods of commercialism were slow to smile upon the hearts and handbags of Hogtown where, by the early 1900s, a fully developed downtown core was crawling with street-level merchants among the steel skyscrapers.

Eaton’s department store was arguably the biggest booster behind lukewarm shopping sprees in the ’20s and ’30s, with ads for pipes, magazine subscriptions and those ubiquitous socks and ties.

The king-for-a-day concept failed to excite papa’s party-pooper of a newspaper, which predicted in 1937 the occasion “will probably peter out” because he “gets his satisfactions otherwise.”

The Toronto Star changed its tune the following year, declaring that the event once treated “as a joke” was now serious business. And it dispatched a reporter to a sports store to prove it.

Among the gifts scooped up by women and children for the lord of the manor were goldfish, bait worms and, inexplicably, alligators.

“We have sold many baby alligators to boys to be presented to their fathers,” proprietor Cecil Clapp said. One child bought a turtle, knowing full well that if dad didn’t like it, he’d get it, Clapp added.

According to the chairman of the Toronto Father’s Day Committee, whose purpose and activities were never explained in the newspaper, it took an extra 600 salespeople to handle gift purchases for an estimated 10,000 dads that year.

One haberdasher described the activity thusly: “A present is purchased for pop and it’s usually something he doesn’t want. And on top of that, he usually has to pay for it.”

Still, one presumes that fathers were also treated to an outing with their offspring although any enthusiasm for an early summer dip in the Don River was doused by warnings about contamination from sewage disposal plants.

But there were plenty of beaches dotting the waterfront as long as you steered clear of Fallingbrook in the east end, where family friendliness was forfeited by rowdy teens.

Meanwhile, fatherhood on a multitudinous scale prompted a public tip of the hat to the city’s most famous procreator of the era, Richard Toomath.

“No, no birth control for me,” the sire of 25 youngsters told the Star in 1938. “Don’t hold with it.”

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As a 73-year-old the year before, the Irish-born war vet posed for a picture with his youngest child, aged 3, before marching in the annual Orange parade.

Mrs. Toomath — his third spouse and mother of his last 10 children — was “the picture of a happy, healthy housewife,” the Star reported.

With the Great Depression winding down, retailers began cranking up for more business. Eaton’s ran full-page ads pitching everything from car batteries for $5.98 to two-trouser suits for $25.

One promo included a little pep talk: “He’ll pooh-pooh and protest to be sure (fathers are like that), but don’t let his apparent indifference lull you into letting the day slip by without remembrance of some kind.”

Not to be outdone, Simpson’s called itself “the store for men” and plied moth-guarded sample suits for $17.75.

The Saturday paper trumpeted the benefits of both Mother’s and Father’s Day at a time when families were battered by “economic insecurity (and the) modern industrial system.” A special day for parents, it opined, helped children “form habits of thoughtfulness and tenderness.”

Consumerism changed again with the outbreak of World War II. While Eaton’s was asking Canadians to help fight the war by buying victory bonds, the popular Savarin restaurant was pushing a Father’s Day dinner of broiled Georgian Bay whitefish and fresh strawberries for 65 cents a mouth.

With the war over, the focus shifted from fatherhood to manhood. Cargo toiletries – “as masculine as a fox hunt” – promised to leave the recipient “glowing with virility!”

By the 1950s, it seemed the populace’s paternal priorities weren’t all store-bought. Consider the much-blessed John Beames who made the Star’s front page in June, 1955 for having “eight pretty daughters and a good-looking wife,” as the paper described them.

Beames called himself the luckiest father in Toronto, thanks to an octet of Daddy’s girls.

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