National Boss' Day

History

The account traces to one place, and it is specific. ABC7 Chicago reports that the day "was created in 1958 when Patricia Bays Haroski, a secretary at State Farm in Deerfield, Illinois," registered it with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. On the date: "Haroski chose October 16th as the date, because it was her father's birthday. She was working for him at the time." Four years later, by the same account, "In 1962, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner made the date official by proclamation."

Two things are worth being precise about. First, a governor's proclamation makes a date official in that governor's state and nowhere else, so Kerner's 1962 action is an Illinois matter rather than a national designation. There is no federal status behind National Boss's Day, then or now.

Second, the record itself is thin. The story above rests on local Chicago news coverage of its own hometown holiday. No corresponding record could be found at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, at State Farm, or in Illinois state records available online, so the registration and the proclamation are reported here as that coverage reports them, and not as independently confirmed. Other details that circulate — an exact registration date, a national proclamation — have no source that could be found, and are left out.

How to observe

The structural problem with Boss's Day is that the gift flows upward, which makes any gift slightly compromised. The honest version is to write something specific instead of buying something generic: one decision your manager made this year that was difficult and correct, named plainly. It costs nothing, it cannot be read as currying favor the way a purchase can, and it is the only form of this that a good manager actually keeps.

If you are the boss, the useful move is to decline in advance. Say that nothing is expected, and if the office wants a day for recognition, point at Administrative Professionals Day in April, when the gesture runs the other way.

A manager who wants to mark it from their own side can use the date as a standing prompt: one unhurried conversation with each person about what they want to be doing in a year, kept separate from any review cycle. The date is arbitrary; a reliable annual prompt is not.

And nothing obliges anyone to take part. Organized pressure to contribute to a group gift for a supervisor is a misuse of a day that a secretary invented, in part, to honor her own father.