Background History of Father's Day On July 5, 1908, a West Virginia church sponsored the nation’s first event explicitly in honor of fathers, a Sunday sermon in memory of the 361 men who had died in the previous December’s explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company mines in Monongah, but it was a one-time commemoration and not an annual holiday. Grace Golden Clayton was mourning the loss of her father when, on December 1907, the Monongah Mining Disaster in nearby Monongah killed 361 men, 250 of them fathers, leaving around a thousand fatherless children. Clayton suggested her pastor Robert Thomas Webb to honor all those fathers. xxXxx I read a few of the “Top 10 Worst Dads of all Time” lists, and most of them focused on the worst historical fathers, or celebrity fathers, but not the worst fathers, period. Just reading a few posts on http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com shows me that common peasant fathers do more heinous crimes than many of the so-called “worst fathers o...