Remember your very first and official Fathers Day celebration?

When you become a Father, you enter something like a special club. You don’t need a secret handshake nor do you have to wear crazy-looking headgear. However, you can feel an acknowledgement and if you’re lucky, you’ll also feel appreciation.

Don’t look now but another one is creeping up on us Dads (or Granddads). But it’s the first one that you keep going back to and the way it felt to tell the world you were a Dad. A Father. A man with a wife and a first child.

My first one came as we moved from Houston to Brownsville, where I had been hired as a reporter. My wife took a job teaching at a parochial school. Our first child, a daughter, and us ended up living in that city’s low income housing projects. Years later, Jennifer Andrea would warn her friends not to mess with her because she used to live in the projects!

Another one caught us in San Jose then L.A. Stockton followed and finally Sacramento. That same little girl, when a junior high school secretary sarcastically remarked if her family were migrants, calmly looked her in the eye and told her that her family was indeed a migrant one.

“We’re media migrants!” she said as she skipped away.

I learned long ago that dads are not as ‘admired’ as moms on their day. It was no great mystery. Nor was it a sin. Any dad worth his weight in, eh, gifts knows this.

But do remember (or learn) this: in a commercial society like ours that has desecrated even the birth of Christ in the name of profit, what can we expect?

Ask your children what Memorial Day or President’s Day is all about and you’re liable to hear about a memorial sale at the local auto mall or a huge discount in honor of George Washington at a big furniture store. Well, the day set aside to honor dads is no different. Or so we thought.

According to some fact finding group, dads today total more than 70 million here in the U.S. Not a bad number for those involved in peddling whatever on a special day to ‘honor’ all these millions. Cha-ching.

Dig for more facts and you’ll discover that back in the 1920s and 1930s, a movement arose to shelf Mother’s Day and Father’s Day altogether and create a single holiday, Parents’ Day. Perhaps those in the know thought that families belonged together, commercialism be damned. Ha!

The Great Depression, however, undid this plan as struggling retailers and advertisers intensified their efforts to make Father’s Day resemble a “second Christmas”! They mounted campaigns promoting goods such as neckties, hats, socks, pipes and tobacco, golf clubs and other sporting goods, and, of course, greeting cards.

Shrewd commercial-minded American businesspersons didn’t stop there. When World War II began, PR firms and advertisers claimed that celebrating Father’s Day was a way to honor American troops and support the war effort. Guess they never heard of Rosie the Riveter.

To begin with, Fathers Day was inspired by Mothers Day. Washington State celebrated the nation’s first statewide Father’s Day on July 19, 1910 but you’ll never guess who finally signed a proclamation making the day a federal one that eventually led to Americans spending more than $1 billion in gifts for us each year.

After more than six decades as the special day seen by some as a peripheral event aimed at beefing up store sales, Fathers Day finally came into its own in 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon recognized it as an official holiday to be marked on the third Sunday in June. It was a long time coming as Mother’s Day, the equivalent holiday, had been celebrated since 1913, thanks to President Woodrow Wilson.

I still recall my Dad, José taking me to a lounge he used to frequent after I turned 21. He said he wanted to show me something. He pointed to a fading cardboard stuck on a large mirror.

“The best thing a Father can do is teach his Children to love their Mother,” the poster said.

I convinced him to buy me a beer and we both toasted Mom.

On Fathers Day.