Spring Has Sprung in Manhattan

  "April is the cruelest month," wrote T. S. Elliot, but for the Gage family, the current month of April, which we spent in New York, has been the best ever, as we greeted a new little grandson and watched the city burst into bloom after a winter of record snow.

On April 2, Nicolas José Baltodano Gage was born--our second grandchild and Amalia's little brother.  And in Central Park, the snow drops were blossoming among the snow drifts.

 On April 5 Baby Baltodano headed for home strapped to his Papi's chest, because home was only two blocks from the hospital.

On April 9, Amalia colored eggs for Greek Easter (on April 12 this year) while Tia Marina, visiting from San Francisco, talked on the phone.  Amalia made the chick and rabbit place cards for the Easter table as well...

...and Nicolas celebrated being one week old.

On April 12, there was an egg hunt at home, followed by church at Holy Trinity Cathedral...

...Nicolas chatted with Amalia from his basket...

...and Uncle Bob's egg beat all challengers at the egg cracking game.

The next day Nicolas enjoyed his first outing-- to Central Park near the boat pond-- but he's hidden under Eleni's breastfeeding shawl...

...while Amalia examined the fountain in her favorite playground, which will squirt water on hot summer days.

On April 18, the first really warm day, people gathered outside their favorite coffee shop in the sun  on Lexington Avenue next to masses of flowers...

...And two statues of the Virgin Mary had their own offerings of fresh flowers.

Tulips were blooming everywhere.

On April 18, because the baby's umbilical cord stub had come off, the family gathered on the balcony to plant it for strength and health in the dirt of one of the trees--a custom in Papi Emilio's native Nicaragua.

Amalia did the digging.

On Monday the 20th,  April showers began, but Amalia was ready, with her rain coat, rain boots and umbrella, for Papou to take her to preschool.

On our last day before returning to Massachusetts, Eleni took us to lunch at a restaurant on 81st Street called Antonucci's, and on the way, she snapped our picture in front of this great grafitti work of art by Nick Walker, an artist from Bristol, England  (not Banksy, who is from the same city.)  We really do love New York in the Spring, especially in April!

Smiley's 50 Years Old and Starring in a Book

In today's Worcester Telegram was this article by Laura Porter.  It includes a preview of the book I wrote for the Worcester History Museum--"The Saga of Smiley"-- which will be available at the end of this month.  (I'll keep you posted.)

Half Century of Smiley--

Historical Museum, new book

mark 50th birthday of the happy

icon created by Harvey Ball

A Sept. 9, 1971, photo shows Harvey Ball and Joy P. Young of the Worcester Mutual Fire Insurance Company with the 'smile' button designed by Ball in 1963 for a campaign developed by Young to increase cheerfulness and helpfulness among employees of the company, which had recently merged with State Mutual.
(T&G File Photo)
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On Oct. 5, 2002, people gathered behind Worcester City Hall to create a human Smiley Face for World Smile Day. Charlie Ball, the son the Smiley Face creator Harvey Ball, started the practice. (T&G File Photo/BETTY JENEWIN)
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The Worcester Historical Museum has several Smiley-themed items on display, including an original pin from the 1964 campaign.
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Items on exhibit at the Worcester Historical Society. (T&G Staff/TOM RETTIG)
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In a 1999 photo, Harvey Ball stands next to the U.S. Postal Service commemorative stamp at the Worcester Common Outlets. On Oct. 5, 2002, people gathered behind Worcester City Hall to create a human Smiley Face for World Smile Day. Charlie Ball, the son the Smiley Face creator Harvey Ball, started the practice. (T&G File Photo)
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Smiley-adorned objects at the Historical Museum.
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By Laura Porter

Fifty years ago, Worcester freelance commercial artist Harvey Ball doodled two black eyes, the right a little bigger than the other, and an off-center smile on a bright yellow circle — and created an image for generations to come.

Ball wasn't paid much for the project, which he took on for a campaign to boost morale for Worcester's State Mutual Life Insurance — now Hanover Insurance — it went through a corporate reorganization. Nor did it take him very long.

But after the Smiley Face first appeared on Jan. 3, 1964, in "The Mutualite," the insurance company's newsletter, it took off, adopted widely as a symbol of happiness and good humor — both actual and ideal.

By 1966, the Smiley button was the second most popular button nationally, next to Avis' "We Try Harder." It morphed into the American counterculture and psychedelic art in the 1970s. In 1988, it became the symbol of the rave scene during the Second Summer of Love in Great Britain. The United States Post Office added the "America Smiles" Smiley stamp in 1999.

From lapel buttons to the emoticon and everything in between, the Smiley has been a universal image for decades. So much so, in fact, that, in the United States at least, it is legally defined as within the public domain and cannot be trademarked.

"It rises and falls in terms of style and cachet," notes Harvey Ball's son, local attorney Charlie Ball, describing the commercial appropriation of the Smiley over the past five decades. Despite the ebb and flow, his father, who died in 2001, lived long enough to understand that "it has legs" and to receive "the recognition that he was the guy" who created it.

"It's a quirky kind of legacy, but fundamentally good," he says. "He was pleased and proud."

His father fully appreciated the power of that fundamental goodness. In 1999, it was he who started The World Smile Corporation and World Smile Day.

Celebrated every year on the first Friday of October, World Smile Day is intended "to devote one day each year to smiles and kind acts throughout the world," notes the website www.worldsmileday.com.

The Harvey Ball World Smile Foundation, created in 2001 in Ball's memory and run by Charlie Ball, now sponsors World Smile Day activities in Worcester and around the world.

The Worcester Historical Museum has long been involved in showcasing Worcester's ties to the Smiley Face, beginning with the first Smiley exhibit at the museum in 1996, mounted with help from Harvey Ball himself.

A more extensive exhibit in 2006 coincided with the first Harvey Ball, held that fall at the newly restored Union Station.

That year also marked the first awarding of the Harvey Smile Award, given to "the person, group or institution that has helped Worcester smile," says the museum's executive director, William D. Wallace.

Nominations are accepted in January every year and the winner is announced in the spring; the award is presented at the annual ball in September. Previous recipients include Mary and Warner Fletcher, former City Manager Mike O'Brien for his work on City Plaza, and the late Miles McDonough and his wife, Jean.

"Everyone loves Smiley," says writer Joan Paulson Gage, who has just written "The Saga of Smiley: How a Cheerful Icon Changed the World."

Commissioned by the Worcester Historical Museum, the book marks the centerpiece of the museum's celebration of the 50th anniversary this year.

A book launch is planned for January, and the hope is that the book, now published by the museum and privately printed, will be picked up by a publisher and distributed internationally.

"When I started two years ago, I had no idea that there was enough research for a book on it," says Gage, who did the publicity for the museum's 2006 Smiley exhibit and has written extensively about the icon.

"At first, it was still part of pop culture for me. Now it's become my big thrill — I take a picture or notice every time I see a Smiley Face."

And she sees them everywhere.

The book is a bright and informative compendium of all things Smiley, from its inception through the contemporary competition to beat the Guinness record for world's largest human Smiley. (Charlie Ball started the practice in 2002 as part of World Smile Day with a crowd of 200 in front of City Hall. The current record was set in February 2012 in India with 3,737 participants.)

Along the way, Gage explores fashion comics, music — and even crime. The killers who committed the Smiley Face Murders from 1997-2007 left Smiley graffiti near many of the crime scenes; OJ Simpson added a Smiley to his signature in a suicide note in 1994 as he fled in the aftermath of his wife's murder.

More benign are the pop artists who incorporate the well-known yellow figure, Stan Lowman, Ron English and Takashi Murakami among them. Banksy, the anonymous British graffiti artist, creates surprise Smileys in public venues.

Given the explosion of technology, it should come as no surprise that Smiley has made its way into a new form of language: the emoticon and the emoji.

"It's contributed to the death of the English language," says Gage wryly, observing that we have returned to the pictograph 5,000 years after Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Gage's research — and the detailed timeline she created as an appendix to the book — firmly establishes the direct line between Harvey Ball's original sketch and Smiley's explosion.

In the 1960s and 1970s, there were plenty of variants on the Smiley Face, acknowledges Bill Wallace. "It isn't that there were not similar things going on — the Sunkist Kool-Aid pitcher, for example. There will always be people who will say that other things came before it."

In fact, two principal competitors, who purported to be inventors of the Smiley, were important in the popularization of the symbol.

In 1967, advertising executive David Stern from Seattle visited New York with his wife, purchased a Smiley button on the street, and took it home with him to create a multinational campaign for an investment bank with ties to the Asian/Pacific market.

In early 1970, Murray and Bernard Spain, who owned a Philadelphia card shop, first showed Smiley products through their company, Traffic Stoppers, at a trade show. They soon modified the original Ball drawing, splashed it across scores of products and, in 1971, had their slogan, "Smile Face — Have a Happy Day," copywritten.

"They had an empire," says Wallace. One of the brothers even appeared on "What's My Line" as the creator of the Smiley, though they eventually acknowledged Harvey Ball's preeminence.

"The Spains and Stern made millions," says Wallace. "Harvey Ball made $45."

Over time, notes Charlie Ball, the controversy about who created Smiley "would come and go." Nonetheless, no matter who does the research, the "pretenders to the throne" are always revealed as imposters, underscoring the reality that Ball's drawing came before anything else.

"Yellow, with one eye bigger, and that funny little smile," says Wallace. "It's the iconic all-American Smiley Face that came out of Worcester. And Joan's book sets the record straight."

To that end, he says, in this 50ths year, it is high time that Worcester steps forward to claim its Smiley heritage once and for all.

"If you look at a history of Philadelphia, they take credit for the Smiley Face. If you look at a history of Washington State, they take credit for the Smiley Face. It's time for Worcester to take credit for it."

The museum is issuing an invitation to Worcester residents, past and present, to come up with a multitude of ways to participation in Smiley's big birthday.

Wallace is also asking people "to share their pictures, memories and artifacts" related to the Smiley Face for a new exhibit to augment the current collection.

"I hope people will go into their attics and find memorabilia and loan or donate it to the museum. Maybe they worked at State Mutual and have memories."

"We're kicking off the year and have lots of plans, starting with the book's publication," he says. The September Harvey Ball will be a prime opportunity to celebrate. Nominations for the Harvey Smile Award are being accepted this month.

"Let's put Worcester's Smiley Face on the map," urges Wallace. "Harvey Ball created it, but it belongs to all of us."

Street Artist Banksy and his Peculiar Pet Shop

On the same weekend in October that I visited the CFA – IAMs Cat Championship in Madison Square Garden and the Van Gogh exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, I also went with two fellow crones down to Greenwich Village to view an exhibit by anonymous British street artist Banksy.

No one knows who Banksy really is, including the young men and women who were keeping watch over his Greenwich Village exhibit. (I asked them. They said they’ve never met him) According to Wikipedia Banksy is "a well-known pseudo-anonymous British artist believed to have been born in 1974."

His street art usually combines graffiti and a stenciling technique — leaving political statements on walls -- but in New York he opened a realistic-looking "Pet Store and Charcoal Grill" at 89 Seventh Avenue between West 4th and Bleeker Street. (Love the irony in that title…It was only there from October 9 to Halloween and we crones felt privileged to see this street art in action before Banksy folded it up and took it away. It was the first time Banksy has used animation to create exhibits that moved.)

From the outside, the Pet Store featured what appeared to be a large leopard sitting in the window with a twitching tail. (“Do not tap on the glass", said a sign.) But when you went inside, the "leopard" turned out to be a strategically folded leopard coat. With a moving tail.

In another window was a white rabbit applying lipstick while looking in a mirror. There was also a hen with several "chicks" --- really animated large chicken nuggets -- drinking out of a dish of barbecue sauce. Inside the store were fish sticks swimming in an aquarium, sliced sausages and hot dogs eating out of dishes and a chimpanzee watching a TV video of chimpanzees having sex.

As you've probably figured out by now, Banksy is making an ironic comment about how we turn animals into processed food and torture rabbits, for instance, to test cosmetics. What I liked about the exhibit (which some bewildered folk mistook for an actual pet store) is that it's good-natured and humorous piece of art that gets the artist's point across more effectively than a diatribe, or throwing flour at Lindsey Lohan or paint at Sarah Jessica Parker when they wear furs.

There was a book inside the “Pet Store” where people were encouraged to write their reactions to the art. Someone who was there before me had written: "Banksy totally gets it! This is why I don't eat meat." But the children passing by outside with their parents were delighted with the moving exhibits in the "Pet Store and Charcoal Grill." Perhaps it would start them thinking, the next time they saw a chicken nugget or a sausage, perhaps not, but it was more engaging that an exhibit of calves being tortured in cages, and so was probably more effective in making people think about where their food comes from.

Another artist who is referred to as a “guerrilla artist” or street artist (because he paints his political statements on walls and then runs away before he can be arrested) is Sheperd Fairey, who is the hot young artist of the day ever since he designed the terrific red, white and blue poster of Obama for his campaign. Sheperd Fairey, Banksy and their ilk have had a huge influence on young artists.

It was fun to watch passers-by the Pet Store do a double take and then come up and study the exhibits. This is the best kind of interactive art. It reminded me of walking through a snowy Central Park on the last day of Christo's "Gates” in February 2005 and watching hundreds, maybe thousands of people--some who had flown in from Europe --touching, discussing and interacting with the 7,500 saffron-colored fabric panels which transformed Central Park on a cold winter day into an open air museum where everyone had something to say about the art.

(If you want to see more photos and a discussion of Banksy’s pet store and grill, follow this link:)

www.woostercollective.com/2008/10/the_village_pet_store_and_charchoal_gril.html

And if you want a copy of The Secret life of Greek Cats” for an animal lover on your holiday list:

www.GreekCats.com