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Founding Fathers
The Man: Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, aka Jelly Roll Morton (September 20, 1885 – July 10, 1941)
The Father of: Jazz. Morton composed the
first jazz composition ever published, Jelly Roll Blues, in
1915. He claimed to have invented jazz in 1902.
The Story: Morton was born to F.P. Lamothe and Louise Monette in
a common-law marriage. At the age of fourteen, he began working as a
piano player in a New Orleans brothel. When his family discovered that
he wasn’t working in a barrel factory as he claimed, they kicked him out
of the house.
From New World Encyclopedia: “Morton’s lively stomps,
compelling blues and high-spirited ragtime pieces, originally performed
in the mid-1920s, have proven among his most memorable work.” In 2000,
he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and, in 2005, he
received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Whaaa?: Jelly Roll is a spongy pastry and a sexual reference.
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The
Man: Earl Owen, A.O., Lg. d’Hon., D.Sc., MB., BS., M.D.,
M.S.,
FRACS., FRCS., FICS., FRCSE., FACBS.
The Father of: Reverse vasectomy, as well as four children and five grandchildren
The Story: This doctor and
professor at
Whaaa?
Owen is an ex-concert pianist. Wherever he is – in the
lab, office, car, home – music must be played.
Double Whaaa?? Owen successfully performed some of the first amputated finger and limb replants. In 1998 he organized and led an international team that performed the first successful hand transplant followed in January 2000 by the first double-hands transplant.
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The Man: (Franz) Joseph Haydn (March 31, 1732 – May 31, 1809), Austrian composer
The Father of: The symphony. Haydn did not have any children with his wife, Maria Anna Aloysia Apollonia Keller (1729-1800). But he is rumored to have had a son with his lover, singer L. Polzelli. Among his last words was his attempt to calm his servants when the French under Napoleon were attacking Austria and a canon shot fell nearby: “My children, have no fear, for where Haydn is, no harm can fall.”
The Story: One of the most important, prolific and prominent composers of the classical period, Haydn was a close friend of Wolfgang Mozart and a teacher of Ludwig van Beethoven. During his six decades of composing, he wrote 106 symphonies, 36 concertos, 14 masses, 16 operas, 45 piano trios, 62 piano sonata and 74 string quartets which, according to Wikipedia, showed “a gradual but steady increase in complexity and musical sophistication.”
Whaaa? Haydn’s father Mathias Haydn, the village mayor, and his mother, Maria, who had worked as a cook in a palace, could not read music. But they noticed early on that their son was musically gifted, so they accepted a proposal from their relative Johann Matthias Frankh, the schoolmaster and choirmaster in Hainburg, that Joseph be apprenticed to Frankh in his home to train as a musician. Joseph went to Hainburg (seven miles away) and never again lived with his parents. He was six years old.
Double Whaaa?? After Haydn was buried in a local cemetery, two associates, Karl Rosenbaum and Johann Peter, secretly dug up the casket, severed Haydn’s head and stole it in the hopes of proving certain phrenological theories. Peter kept it on a white cushion in a custom-made black wooden box with glass windows. In 1932, Haydn’s body was moved to a marble tomb in the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt. In 1954, the head was finally reunited with the body.
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The Man: Dr. Drew Pinsky (born September 4, 1958)
Father of: Call-in radio and TV shows about love and sex. With wife Susan, he is father to triplets Douglas, Jordan and Paulina, born in 1992.
His Story: His father, Morton Pinsky, was a physician; his mother, Helene Stanton, is a retired singer and actress. He majored in biology at Amherst and earned his doc creds at the USC School of Medicine in 1984. Taking over for Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the media mother of sexual advice, Pinsky has hosted or co-hosted Loveline, a call-in radio show since 1984 and a show on MTV since 1996. He also hosts Strictly Sex with Dr. Drew and Strictly Dr. Drew on the Discovery Health Channel, Sex...with Mom and Dad on MTV, and Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew, Celebrity Rehab and Sober House on VH1.
Mary Carey, a patient on Season One of Celebrity Rehab, relapsed and returned to porn, starring in and directing a parody film called Celebrity Pornhab with Dr. Screw, a decision Pinsky says made him “very sad.”
Whaaa: Pinksy was a contestant on Wheel of Fortune in 1984, receiving forty gallons of Sunny Delight and a year’s supply of Turtle Wax as consolation prizes.
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The Man: Carl Gustav Jung, born Karle Gustav Jung II (1875 – 1961)
Father of: Analytical psychology; the concepts of introversion, extroversion, collective unconscious and archetypes; art therapy and, indirectly through founder Bill Wilson, of Alcoholics Anonymous. His collected works – including The Psychology of the Unconscious (1912) and Psychological Types (1921) – fill nineteen volumes.
Jung warned that we rely too heavily on science and logic. Emphasizing balance and harmony, he argued for integrating spirituality and appreciating our unconscious realms.
The Story: His father was a poor rural pastor; his mother came from a wealthy and established Swiss family, but she was a weird woman (one night, Jung claims, he saw a faintly luminous figure coming from her room. The head was detached from the neck and floated in the air) spending much of her time in a separate bedroom. According to Wikipedia, Jung had a better relationship with his father because he thought him to be predictable and thought his mother to be problematic. His mother’s often depressed mood influenced her son’s attitude towards women, which he described as having “innate unreliability.”
Jung collaborated but soon broke with his cohort Sigmund Freud. According to Jung, dreams are not attempts to conceal our true feelings from the waking mind, but rather they are windows to our unconscious. They serve to guide the waking self to achieve wholeness and offer solutions to problems we face in our waking lives.
Father of: Analytical psychology; the concepts of introversion, extroversion, collective unconscious and archetypes; art therapy and, indirectly through founder Bill Wilson, of Alcoholics Anonymous. His collected works – including The Psychology of the Unconscious (1912) and Psychological Types (1921) – fill nineteen volumes.
Jung warned that we rely too heavily on science and logic. Emphasizing balance and harmony, he argued for integrating spirituality and appreciating our unconscious realms.
The Story: His father was a poor rural pastor; his mother came from a wealthy and established Swiss family, but she was a weird woman (one night, Jung claims, he saw a faintly luminous figure coming from her room. The head was detached from the neck and floated in the air) spending much of her time in a separate bedroom. According to Wikipedia, Jung had a better relationship with his father because he thought him to be predictable and thought his mother to be problematic. His mother’s often depressed mood influenced her son’s attitude towards women, which he described as having “innate unreliability.”
Jung collaborated but soon broke with his cohort Sigmund Freud. According to Jung, dreams are not attempts to conceal our true feelings from the waking mind, but rather they are windows to our unconscious. They serve to guide the waking self to achieve wholeness and offer solutions to problems we face in our waking lives.
Whaaa? At age 12, he was pushed to the ground by another boy
so hard that he was unconscious for a moment. He thought to himself,
“Now I won’t have to go to school any more.” From then on, whenever he
started off to school or began homework, he fainted. He remained at
home for the next six months until he overheard his father worrying to
a visitor of his son’s future ability to support himself. Young Jung
immediately went into his father’s study and began poring over Latin
grammar. This event, Jung later recalled, “was when I learned what a neurosis is.”
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The Man: Les Paul (June 9, 1915 – August 13, 2009, at age 94)
Father of: The electric guitar
The Story: A musician and songwriter, Paul is best remembered as an inventor. He created the solid-body guitar enjoyed by rock stars such as Duane Allman, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Hendrix, Steve Miller (his godson), Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen. He invented a neck-worn harmonica holder. He gets credit for developing overdubbing, delay effects (such as tape delay and phasing) and multi-track recording.
In the 1950s, Paul performed with his wife Mary Ford, and they sold millions of records. In 2006, at age 90, he won two Grammys.
Whaaa? Paul was born Lester William Polfuss. During his teens he recorded hillbilly songs under the name Rhubarb Red.
Father of: The electric guitar
The Story: A musician and songwriter, Paul is best remembered as an inventor. He created the solid-body guitar enjoyed by rock stars such as Duane Allman, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Hendrix, Steve Miller (his godson), Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen. He invented a neck-worn harmonica holder. He gets credit for developing overdubbing, delay effects (such as tape delay and phasing) and multi-track recording.
In the 1950s, Paul performed with his wife Mary Ford, and they sold millions of records. In 2006, at age 90, he won two Grammys.
Whaaa? Paul was born Lester William Polfuss. During his teens he recorded hillbilly songs under the name Rhubarb Red.
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The Man: Martin Cooper (born 1928)
Father of: The cell phone
The Story: As a general manager at Motorola, Dr. Cooper stepped out onto a busy New York City street 36 years ago and made the first call on a portable cell phone, the size of a huge brick, on April 3, 1973. He made the call to his rival at Bell Labs, Joel Engel, head of research. (Bell Laboratories had introduced the idea of cellular communications in 1947 with police-car technology, but Cooper at Motorola incorporated the portable technology into non-car use.) The first words spoken on a cell phone were, “Joel, I’m calling you from a real portable cellular telephone.”
Says Cooper, “I love competition.”
Cooper currently is executive chairman of ArrayComm, a California company developing multi-antenna signal processing software for wireless communications systems – his fifth startup.
Whaaa? Cooper recently told a CNN audience, “The future of the cell phone will continue to be personal.... In the long term, you may even have your cell phone embedded, perhaps, under the skin behind your ear.”
Father of: The cell phone
The Story: As a general manager at Motorola, Dr. Cooper stepped out onto a busy New York City street 36 years ago and made the first call on a portable cell phone, the size of a huge brick, on April 3, 1973. He made the call to his rival at Bell Labs, Joel Engel, head of research. (Bell Laboratories had introduced the idea of cellular communications in 1947 with police-car technology, but Cooper at Motorola incorporated the portable technology into non-car use.) The first words spoken on a cell phone were, “Joel, I’m calling you from a real portable cellular telephone.”
Says Cooper, “I love competition.”
Cooper currently is executive chairman of ArrayComm, a California company developing multi-antenna signal processing software for wireless communications systems – his fifth startup.
Whaaa? Cooper recently told a CNN audience, “The future of the cell phone will continue to be personal.... In the long term, you may even have your cell phone embedded, perhaps, under the skin behind your ear.”
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The Man: Alfred Charles Kinsey (1894 – 1956)
Father of: As the founder of the Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, Kinsey is the father of sexology. He is also the father of four children with his wife, the former Clara Bracken McMillen: son Don (who died just before his fifth birthday), daughters Anne and Joan, and son Bruce.
The Story: Kinsey was an entomologist and zoologist at Indiana University with a profound interest in human sexual behavior. In the 1940s and early 1950s, with research funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, Dr. Kinsey and his colleagues interviewed 18,000 Americans (including groups of amputees, children, couples, homosexuals, pedophiles, prisoners, prostitutes, stutterers … the list really is endless) about their sex lives. They published their findings in what historian Mary Roach, in her outrageous book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, describes as “two ground-breaking, best-selling, and ultimately career-tanking volumes.”
Whaaa?: Among many scientific experiments and observations, Kinsey measured the average distance traveled by ejaculated semen among 300 men. The record holder landed just shy of eight feet.
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The Mann: Horace Mann (May 4, 1796 – August 2, 1859)
Father of: American public education
The Story: Mann promoted the cause of universal, free, non-sectarian public schools. He urged separate classrooms for students at different levels of learning and discouraged learning by rote and flogging as punishment. Mann worked effectively for more and better equipped school houses, extended school years (until students turned 16), higher pay for teachers and a wider curriculum.
As president of Antioch College at Yellow Springs, Ohio, he employed the first female faculty member in the U.S. to be paid on an equal basis with her male colleagues. His commencement message to the class of 1859, two months before his own death, encouraging students to be “ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity,” is repeated to the graduating class at each commencement.
Whaa? He was brother-in-law to author Nathaniel Hawthorne. For a while, the Manns lived with the Hawthornes.
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The Man: Father Time
Father of: Time. In many New Year’s Eve traditions, he represents not all time but just the previous 365 days, handing over his timely duties to a cute little baby on New Year’s Eve.
The Story: Known in Greek mythology as Chronos and in some countries as Pakiž, Father Time is often depicted as an elderly bearded man, dressed in a robe, carrying a clock or hourglass and often a scythe. Saturn was the Roman god of Time. Chief among the Roman Gods prior to Jupiter, Saturn was honored at a wild and whacky midwinter festival, Saturnalia, which lasted several days. All business was suspended and schools were closed. Parents gave toys to their children, and there was a public banquet.
Whaa? In mythology, Saturn was the son of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth), and the youngest of the twelve Titans. On the advice of his mom (who felt Uranus was reluctant to eventually yield his power to the younger generation), Saturn castrated his father and thus separated Heaven from Earth. Gaea created a flint scythe with which to do the dastardly deed. It was the tool by which life was cut down at the time of harvest and was crescent-shaped like the moon. Some myths have it that Uranus’ genitals (which were tossed into the sea) produced Venus. Anyway, Saturn’s emasculation of Uranus now made the son the king of the Titans, cementing the rotation of the generations – the cycles of life. The scythe became representative of the sad, unrelenting flow of time.
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The Man: Hippocrates
Father of: Modern Medicine
The Story: Hippocrates (who lived somewhere around 460-430 BCE to 360-370 BCE) was born on the island of Cos, Greece, and was taught medicine by his father Heraclides. Hippocrates was a physician who made house calls. He founded the Coyan Medical School and wrote some 70 books known as the Hippocratic Corpus. He died in old age in Thessalia.
Whaa? Part I: The Hippocratic school of medicine held that illness is the result of an imbalance of the human body’s four humors – yellow bile, blood, phlegm and black bile. They were characterized by the same properties – dry, hot, wet and cold as the four elements – fire, air, water and earth. Hippocratic therapy was directed towards restoring this balance.
Whaa? Part II: The two sons of Hippocrates – Thessalus and Draco – were his students. They each had sons named Hippocrates.
Whaa? Part III: From the Hippocratic Oath, “I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel …. Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption and, further, from the seduction of females or males, of freemen and slaves.”
Father of: Modern Medicine
The Story: Hippocrates (who lived somewhere around 460-430 BCE to 360-370 BCE) was born on the island of Cos, Greece, and was taught medicine by his father Heraclides. Hippocrates was a physician who made house calls. He founded the Coyan Medical School and wrote some 70 books known as the Hippocratic Corpus. He died in old age in Thessalia.
Whaa? Part I: The Hippocratic school of medicine held that illness is the result of an imbalance of the human body’s four humors – yellow bile, blood, phlegm and black bile. They were characterized by the same properties – dry, hot, wet and cold as the four elements – fire, air, water and earth. Hippocratic therapy was directed towards restoring this balance.
Whaa? Part II: The two sons of Hippocrates – Thessalus and Draco – were his students. They each had sons named Hippocrates.
Whaa? Part III: From the Hippocratic Oath, “I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel …. Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption and, further, from the seduction of females or males, of freemen and slaves.”
The Man: Miguel Jose Serra at Petra was born on the Spanish island of Mallorca, Spain, on November 24, 1713. At the age of 16, he traveled to Palma, the capital of Mallorca, and entered the service of the Catholic Church, the Order of St. Francis of Assisi, and took a new first name in honor of Saint Juniper.
Father of: California missions
The Story: In 1750, at the age of 36, Father Junipero Serra volunteered to serve the Franciscan missions in the new world and sailed for Vera Cruz, Mexico. In 1769, he set off on an expedition with Gaspar de Portola to found missions in California.
When Father Serra founded the first of California’s missions in San Diego, he was 56 years old. Serra personally established 9 of the 21 missions from San Diego to Sonoma. On August 28, 1784, at the age of 70 and after traveling 24,000 miles, Father Serra died of a snake bite at Mission Carmel. The Father is buried there under the sanctuary floor.
Whaaa? Once, while riding on a mule from Vera Cruz to Mexico City, he injured his leg. It troubled him for the rest of his life but he continued to make his journeys on foot whenever possible and refused all remedies and medications.
During the last three years of his life, he visited the missions from San Diego to San Francisco, traveling more than 600 miles, in order to confirm more than 5,300 Native Americans who had been converted and baptized.
His zeal frequently led him to employ extraordinary means in order to move people to penance; for example, he would pound his breast with a stone while on the pulpit, scourge himself or apply a lit torch to his bare chest.
The Man: Sigmund Freud (born on May 6, 1856; suicide on September 23, 1939)
Father of: Psychoanalysis. He is also the father of three sons and three daughters, all of whom lived in the shadow of his genius. Freud was a loving and generous father but was so committed to his work that his children were raised primarily by their mother, Martha.
The Story: This Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist – who changed the way we think about thinking – wrote essays and books on repressed desires, the unconscious mind, symbolism and the interpretation of dreams. In 1876, he published his first paper about the testicles of eels.
According to Freud, pretty much every aspect of human behavior can be explained in terms of sexual desire (“anatomy is destiny”); however, one of his most famous quotes is, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
Whaaa? Anna, the youngest child and a noted child psychoanalyst in her own right, was her father’s favorite. By no Freudian slip, he once referred to her as “my only son, Anna.”
Martin, the eldest son, wrote in 1957, “I have never had any ambition to rise to eminence…. I have been quite happy and content to bask in reflected glory…. I believe that if the son of a great and famous father wants to get anywhere in this world he must follow the advice given to Alice by the Red Queen – he will have to go twice as fast if he does not want to stop where he is. The son of a genius remains the son of a genius, and his chances of winning human approval of anything he may do hardly exist if he attempts to make any claim to a fame detached from that of his father.”
The Man: Walter Chauncey Camp (April 7, 1859 – March 14, 1925)
Father of: Football
The Story: When Walter Camp (the son of Leverett Camp) entered Yale in 1876, he immediately became one of the best all-around athletes at the university. In his undergraduate days he made every varsity team – rugby, tennis, swimming (from short distances up to five miles), crew, running the hurdles, etc.
Most professional sports start as youth sports. Most youth sports in the United States start as college sports. When we were celebrating our first centennial, the most popular game was rugby. Camp changed that.
As Yale’s first football coach, Camp is credited with restructuring English rugby into American football – creating the scrimmage line, the eleven-man team, signal calling, set plays, the T-formation and the quarterback position. He was the originator of the rule that a team had to give up the ball unless it advanced a specified distance within a set number of downs. Camp was the first man to publish a book on football and was a pioneer in the use of pictures and illustrations as coaching aids. He helped to establish the National Collegiate Athletic Association and was a member of the Intercollegiate Football Rules Committee for 48 years.
Historian Parke Davis found Camp to be “exceptionally fast and extraordinarily strong, resourceful, courageous, thinking continually in terms of football, swiftly solving new situations, and indomitable.”
Whaaa? As a sportswriter, Camp dealt mostly with football. But he also provided advice for fighting the common cold, informed young girls what to expect at the Yale Junior Promenade and changed the way Americans thought about keeping physically fit. He developed a physical fitness routine (the “Daily Dozen”), which became so popular that it was used for the physical conditioning of most U.S. military personnel during World War I and is still part of the Marines’ basic training.
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The Man:
Father of: Three children with first wife, economist Fiorella Kostoris.
Also Father of: The Euro
The Story: In 1982, back when the European Union countries still maintained restrictions on trade and capital movements, he proposed a single currency throughout
Whaaa? Padoa-Schioppa was point man on the 2008 budget, a 1.3-billion euro package presented to the Italian Senate in mid-October 2007. Part of his proposed package was getting grown children to leave their parents’ nests. “Let’s get these big babies out of the home,” said Padoa-Schioppa. “We’re encouraging young people to leave home. If they don’t, they just stay with their parents, they don’t get married, and they don’t become independent.” So Padoa-Schioppa is also father of Italy’s pro-emptynest strategy.
More than half of Italian 25- to 29-year-olds still live with their parents, compared to 21 percent of Germans and just 5 percent of Swedes. They can’t afford to move out. Padoa-Schioppa argued that the government should build more public housing to the tune of 8,000 new apartments a year for a total of 80,000 new residences through 2017.
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The Man: Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks. One of the first “compassionate conservatives,” industrialist Warbucks is a self-made zillionaire ($10 zillion, to be precise). A loving, caring father and philanthropist, he can be as hard as steel. He is listed in Forbes as the world’s richest fictional character.
Adoptive Father of: Little Orphan Annie
The Story: On September 27, 1924, Daddy Warbucks made his appearance in the Little Orphan Annie comic strip. His first wife had Warbucks meet Annie when he returned from a business trip; he was immediately attracted to her can-do attitude, and he fell in love.
Whaaa? Ethnically, Daddy Warbucks is a mogul.
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The Man: John Brown
Father of: Louise Joy Brown, shown here in a 2003 photo with her family. Louise, the world’s first test-tube baby, was born of his seed on July 25, 1978.
The Story: Brits Lesley Brown and her husband John Brown had been trying to have a baby for nine years. “Dear God,” she would pray, “I wouldn’t moan about being kept awake at night and washing dirty diapers if you’d let me have a child.” John tended bar in Bristol and worked for the railroads; Lesley weighed and packaged cheese in a factory.
John may have lusted in his heart. “Find yourself a normal woman,” Lesley told him. “I’ve nothing to give our marriage now that I can’t have a child.” But the Browns saw an infertility specialist and the rest, as they say, is history.
Whaaa? To avoid a media circus (yeah, sure, good luck), the doctors arranged a late-night Caesarean section delivery on July 25. John was sent home from the hospital at the usual time but then, to his surprise, summoned by telephone a few hours later.
Louise married in 2004 and gave birth to a baby boy late last year.
Since Louise’s birth, there have been more than a million in-vitro fertilization births worldwide.
The Man: William Jackson Smart
Father of: Father’s Day. In 1909, Mrs. John Bruce Dodd (nee Sonora Louise Smart), pictured above, proposed the idea of a “father’s day” because she was so grateful to and so fond of her Civil War veteran father. When Sonora was sixteen, her mother died in childbirth, and this single dad raised all six of his children on a rural farm in eastern Washington. Mr. Smart was a pioneer.
The Story: Due to his example and her efforts, the first Father’s Day was celebrated in Spokane, Washington, on June 19, 1910, but it was a local festivity. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge acknowledged the idea of a national Father’s Day to encourage us to love each other better, or at least more, and “to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations.”
Whaaa? Father’s Day didn’t become a national holiday until 1966 when President Lyndon Johnson signed a presidential proclamation establishing it on the third Sunday in June.
Moral: Mrs. Dodd was 85 years old in 1966; her persistence and patience paid off. The devoted daughter of Mr. Smart is a fine model for this fine holiday: Sooner or later, good things happen.
The Man: Thomas Jefferson
Father of: The Declaration of Independence, the Democratic Party and the University of Virginia. In 1772, Jefferson married a 23-year-old widow, Martha Wayles Skelton; they had six children. He also fathered several children with his slave Sally Hemings.
His Father: He was born April 13, 1743, the third of eight children to a pedigreed mother, Jane Randolph, and a wealthy planter and surveyor, Peter Jefferson. His father died when Thomas was 14 years old, whereupon he inherited 5,000 acres of land and a dozen slaves.
The Story: The third president of the United States was also the first secretary of state and the second vice president.
Whaaa? Jefferson gave only two public speeches during his eight-year presidency. In his will, he asked that his plantation Monticello be used as a school for orphans of navy officers. He died on the fourth of July 1826 – on the fiftieth anniversary of adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
Father of: Louise Joy Brown, shown here in a 2003 photo with her family. Louise, the world’s first test-tube baby, was born of his seed on July 25, 1978.
The Story: Brits Lesley Brown and her husband John Brown had been trying to have a baby for nine years. “Dear God,” she would pray, “I wouldn’t moan about being kept awake at night and washing dirty diapers if you’d let me have a child.” John tended bar in Bristol and worked for the railroads; Lesley weighed and packaged cheese in a factory.
John may have lusted in his heart. “Find yourself a normal woman,” Lesley told him. “I’ve nothing to give our marriage now that I can’t have a child.” But the Browns saw an infertility specialist and the rest, as they say, is history.
Whaaa? To avoid a media circus (yeah, sure, good luck), the doctors arranged a late-night Caesarean section delivery on July 25. John was sent home from the hospital at the usual time but then, to his surprise, summoned by telephone a few hours later.
Louise married in 2004 and gave birth to a baby boy late last year.
Since Louise’s birth, there have been more than a million in-vitro fertilization births worldwide.
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The Man: William Jackson Smart
Father of: Father’s Day. In 1909, Mrs. John Bruce Dodd (nee Sonora Louise Smart), pictured above, proposed the idea of a “father’s day” because she was so grateful to and so fond of her Civil War veteran father. When Sonora was sixteen, her mother died in childbirth, and this single dad raised all six of his children on a rural farm in eastern Washington. Mr. Smart was a pioneer.
The Story: Due to his example and her efforts, the first Father’s Day was celebrated in Spokane, Washington, on June 19, 1910, but it was a local festivity. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge acknowledged the idea of a national Father’s Day to encourage us to love each other better, or at least more, and “to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations.”
Whaaa? Father’s Day didn’t become a national holiday until 1966 when President Lyndon Johnson signed a presidential proclamation establishing it on the third Sunday in June.
Moral: Mrs. Dodd was 85 years old in 1966; her persistence and patience paid off. The devoted daughter of Mr. Smart is a fine model for this fine holiday: Sooner or later, good things happen.
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The Man: Thomas Jefferson
Father of: The Declaration of Independence, the Democratic Party and the University of Virginia. In 1772, Jefferson married a 23-year-old widow, Martha Wayles Skelton; they had six children. He also fathered several children with his slave Sally Hemings.
His Father: He was born April 13, 1743, the third of eight children to a pedigreed mother, Jane Randolph, and a wealthy planter and surveyor, Peter Jefferson. His father died when Thomas was 14 years old, whereupon he inherited 5,000 acres of land and a dozen slaves.
The Story: The third president of the United States was also the first secretary of state and the second vice president.
Whaaa? Jefferson gave only two public speeches during his eight-year presidency. In his will, he asked that his plantation Monticello be used as a school for orphans of navy officers. He died on the fourth of July 1826 – on the fiftieth anniversary of adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
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The Man: God
Father of: The Universe, and everything else
The Story: God is traditionally seen as the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, good, merciful and righteous source of all moral obligations – thrifty, brave, clean and inspirational. God is a higher force.
Historically, most gods, although they are supernatural beings, tend to look like, think like and behave like humans. This construction of God in the form and spirit of humans is one of the more universal aspects of organized religion. Sigmund Freud suggests that the concept of “god” is a projection of one’s father.
Whaaaaa? In terms of political subsets in the United States, God is most popular among women Republicans. Of the 90 percent of Americans who believe in God, 93 percent of them are Republicans but only 86 percent of them are men.
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