Volume 16 , Issue 21

NW Okie's Journey

Did you know during the 1920s and 1930s there was a movement to scrap Mothers Day and Fathers Day altogether in favor of a single holiday allied Parents Day?

A pro-parents Day group rallied in New York City's Central Park as a public reminder that both parents should be loved and respected together. But the depression of the 1930s derailed this effort to combine and de-commercialize the holidays. Struggling retailers and advertisers redoubled their efforts to make Father's Day a second Christmas for men, promoting goods such as niceties, hats, socks, pipes and tobacco, golf clubs and other sporting goods, and greeting cards.

Then came World War II, advertisers began to argue that celebrating Father's Day was a way to honor American troops and support the war effort. By the end of the war, Father's Day may not have been a federal holiday, but it was a national institution.

It was in 1972, in the middle of a hard fought presidential re-election campaign, Richard Nixon signed a proclamation making Father's Day a federal holiday.

Did You Know

In 1886-87 the Southern Kansas Railway constructed a line from Kiowa, Kansas, through future Woods County and on to Texas. The Choctaw Northern, building north through Alfalfa County in 1901, placed a spur line west from Ingersoll to Alva.

The Arkansas Valley and Western (part of the St. Louis and San Francisco system) connected Enid, in Garfield County, with Dacoma and Avard in Woods County in 1904-05. In 1919-20 the Buffalo and Northwestern Railroad built from Buffalo to Waynoka. In 1898 the county's farmers shipped thirty-nine carloads of cattle from Alva.

The livestock and livestock products produced by county farmers had a market value of $2.95 million in 1945, and they owned 105,000 cattle and calves at the end of 1990. By 2000, only the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe provided rail service. Two national highways, U.S. 281 and U.S. 64, intersect in Alva.

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