World Laughter Day and the Birth of the Smiley Face

Because today is World Laughter Day and we all could use a little help cheering up,  I'm re-posting the story of Harvey Ball, the artist from Worcester, MA who created the original Smiley Face fifty five years ago and never made more than $45 from his creation.  Then, in 1999, disturbed by the crass commercialization of the Smiley, Harvey created World Smile Day--the first Friday in October every year--to promote the true meaning of the Smiley Face.  So like World Smile Day in October, today--the first Sunday in May-- is a good day to do a random act of kindness as Harvey put it--improving the world "one smile at a time."

When three of Harvey Ball’s comrades were killed by a wayward shell as they stood next to him in Okinawa during World War II, he did not ponder if fate had saved him for a greater destiny.  Harvey, a tall, lanky, laconic Yankee from Worcester, Massachusetts, was not much given to introspection, socializing, talking, or even smiling.  But when he died in 2001 at the age of 79, Harvey had figured out his purpose in life.  As he told  People Magazine in 1998, “I taught the whole world how to smile.”

Harvey Ball, born and raised in Worcester, was the creator of the Smiley Face--that round yellow image that now beams out from Wal-Mart ads, Joe Boxer shorts and internet icons.  When, in December of 1963, he picked up a black pen and a yellow piece of paper and drew the world’s first Smiley Face, Harvey, a self-employed commercial artist, was working on an assignment from a Worcester insurance company suffering from employee discontent after a merger.  They wanted a campaign and buttons to raise company morale. They ordered 100 yellow Smiley Face buttons and then, when those disappeared almost over night, they ordered 10,000 more.

Harvey later figured out that his compensation for creating the Smiley Face button for the Worcester Mutual Insurance Company added up to about $45.   When the lawyers for the company tried to copyright the image eight years later, they learned that it was impossible, because the image, reproduced 50 million times in the year 1971 alone, was in the public domain.  By the mid-seventies, according to the curators of the Worcester Historical Museum, the image had fallen out of favor.

But Smiley made a significant comeback in the late 1980’s when interest in acid and other psychedelic drugs became a major cultural phenomenon. The icon was embraced by trendy downtown club kids.  Those who grew up in the 1970’s—today’s most desirable consumer demographic —view the image with nostalgia. (Some of them also think it was created by Forrest Gump, the fictional movie character.)  When votes were taken by the U.S. Post Office for icons to represent the decade of the 1970’s, the most popular image by far was Smiley, whose stamp was issued in 1999.

Brothers Murray and Bernard Spain of Philadelphia added the phrase “Have a Happy Day” and took in a reported one million dollars in sales of Smiley products in the first six months of 1971 alone.  In 1998, French Businessman Franklin Loufrani claimed that HE had created the image in 1971, and he proceeded to trademark the face in 80 countries.  When faced with Harvey Ball’s earlier creation, Loufrani replied with a Gallic shrug:  “I  don’t care if he designed the Smiley face.  We promote, we own, we market.” 

Riled up by “the France guy” as he put it,  Harvey in 1999 created World Smile Day—the first Friday in October-- to promote the true meaning of the Smiley Face.  And he trademarked it. Harvey said, “World Smile Day® is open to every person on the planet.  No matter what color they are, or who they might pray to, no matter what country they live in.  World Smile Day® simply asks each person to live the day with a generous heart, do one kind act, to help one person smile.  Acts of kindness and smiles are contagious."

Every reporter who interviewed Harvey Ball asked him the same question: was he angry that he never made more than $45 from the creation that could have made him very, very rich?  To every reporter he patiently gave pretty much the same reply: “Hey, I can only eat one steak at a time, drive one car at a time.  I’m not ticked off about it.  I don’t mind getting up in the morning and going to work. They ask me why I’m not upset.  I just get satisfaction from it being so widely used and that it has given so many people pleasure.”

Even though he didn’t want to profit from it, Harvey Ball did want recognition for creating the image whose smile has been called more famous than the Mona Lisa’s.   He said  “Smiley is one of the greatest pieces of art ever created, as simple as it is.  It’s got a very, very positive message. Anybody can use it and reproduce it and it reaches everybody regardless of language, religion, nationality, all those things--as compared to some of the art you get today which you haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re looking at…I’m glad Smiley came from Worcester.  The city should make more of it.  Because no other city has this.”

After Harvey died in 2001 in Worcester, his son, Charles, said : “He was proud and pleased to have served his country and raise a family…He died with no apologies and no regrets.  His moral compass stayed on northh and never wavered."

And he left us the legacy of a smile.

Today is World Smile Day!--The Harvey Ball Story

I think all of us could use a reason to smile about now, so I'm reminding you that today--the first Friday in October--is World Smile Day, started right here in Worcester by the man who invented the Smiley Face icon.   I'm re-posting the story of Harvey Ball, the artist who created the original Smiley Face fifty-three years ago and never made more than $45 from his creation.  Then, in 1999, disturbed by the crass commercialization of the Smiley, Harvey began World Smile Day--the first Friday in October every year--to promote the true meaning of the Smiley Face.  So today, let's all try to do a random act of kindness--improving the world "one smile at a time." 

When three of Harvey Ball’s comrades were killed by a wayward shell as they stood next to him in Okinawa during World War II, he did not ponder if fate had saved him for a greater destiny.  Harvey, a tall, lanky, laconic Yankee from Worcester, Massachusetts, was not much given to introspection, socializing, talking, or even smiling.  But when he died in 2001 at the age of 79, Harvey had figured out his purpose in life.  As he told  People Magazine in 1998, “I taught the whole world how to smile.”

Harvey Ball, born and raised in Worcester, was the creator of the Smiley Face--that round yellow image that now beams out from Wal-Mart ads, Joe Boxer shorts and internet icons.  When, in December of 1963, he picked up a black pen and a yellow piece of paper and drew the world’s first Smiley Face, Harvey, a self-employed commercial artist, was working on an assignment from a Worcester insurance company suffering from employee discontent after a merger.  They wanted a campaign and buttons to raise company morale. They ordered 100 yellow Smiley Face buttons and then, when those disappeared almost over night, they ordered 10,000 more.

Harvey later figured out that his compensation for creating the Smiley Face button for the Worcester Mutual Insurance Company added up to about $45.   When the lawyers for the company tried to copyright the image eight years later, they learned that it was impossible, because the image, reproduced 50 million times in the year 1971 alone, was in the public domain.  By the mid-seventies, according to the curators of the Worcester Historical Museum, the image had fallen out of favor.

But Smiley made a significant comeback in the late 1980’s when interest in acid and other psychedelic drugs became a major cultural phenomenon. The icon was embraced by trendy downtown club kids.  Those who grew up in the 1970’s—today’s most desirable consumer demographic —view the image with nostalgia. (Some of them also think it was created by Forrest Gump, the fictional movie character.)  When votes were taken by the U.S. Post Office for icons to represent the decade of the 1970’s, the most popular image by far was Smiley, whose stamp was issued in 1999.

Brothers Murray and Bernard Spain of Philadelphia added the phrase “Have a Happy Day” and took in a reported one million dollars in sales of Smiley products in the first six months of 1971 alone.  In 1998, French Businessman Franklin Loufrani claimed that HE had created the image in 1971, and he proceeded to trademark the face in 80 countries.  When faced with Harvey Ball’s earlier creation, Loufrani replied with a Gallic shrug:  “I  don’t care if he designed the Smiley face.  We promote, we own, we market.” 

Riled up by “the France guy” as he put it,  Harvey in 1999 created World Smile Day—the first Friday in October-- to promote the true meaning of the Smiley Face.  And he trademarked it. Harvey said, “World Smile Day® is open to every person on the planet.  No matter what color they are, or who they might pray to, no matter what country they live in.  World Smile Day® simply asks each person to live the day with a generous heart, do one kind act, to help one person smile.  Acts of kindness and smiles are contagious."

Every reporter who interviewed Harvey Ball asked him the same question: was he angry that he never made more than $45 from the creation that could have made him very, very rich?  To every reporter he patiently gave pretty much the same reply: “Hey, I can only eat one steak at a time, drive one car at a time.  I’m not ticked off about it.  I don’t mind getting up in the morning and going to work. They ask me why I’m not upset.  I just get satisfaction from it being so widely used and that it has given so many people pleasure.”

Even though he didn’t want to profit from it, Harvey Ball did want recognition for creating the image whose smile has been called more famous than the Mona Lisa’s.   He said  “Smiley is one of the greatest pieces of art ever created, as simple as it is.  It’s got a very, very positive message. Anybody can use it and reproduce it and it reaches everybody regardless of language, religion, nationality, all those things--as compared to some of the art you get today which you haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re looking at…I’m glad Smiley came from Worcester.  The city should make more of it.  Because no other city has this.”

After Harvey died in 2001 in Worcester, his son, Charles, said : “He was proud and pleased to have served his country and raise a family…He died with no apologies and no regrets.  His moral compass stayed on northh and never wavered."

And he left us the legacy of a smile.

Smile--It's World Smile Day!

The world's most recognized  and beloved icon, the beaming yellow Smiley Face, was created in December of 1963 in Worcester, MA by a commercial artist named Harvey Ball who never made more than the $45 he was paid for creating it.  Swiftly Smiley "went viral" in an age before computers and became the most recognizable symbol of good will and good cheer on the planet.

As the years passed Harvey Ball, a decorated WWII vet,  became concerned about the over-commercialization of his symbol, and how its original meaning had become lost in the marketplace.  The Smiley Face knows no politics, no geography and no religion and Harvey wanted to make that clear.  So he declared that the first Friday in October each year would become World Smile Day® with the slogan "Do an act of kindness. Help one person smile."

That's your assignment for  Friday, Oct. 2, 2015, as Harvey and his creation are remembered and celebrated in his hometown of Worcester and around the world.  Below  is part of Harvey's story from the forthcoming book "The Saga of Smiley--How a Cheerful Icon Changed the World."

         Ask the man on the street who invented the Smiley Face and he might reply that it was created by Forrest Gump in the eponymous 1994 film, when Forrest wiped his muddy face on a yellow T-shirt.  Or he might suggest that Smiley has been with us ever since the first bored schoolboy doodled on his algebra notebook.

         But Smiley came into being at a particular time—December of 1963—in a particular place—Worcester, Massachusetts, once a booming industrial metropolis of factories spewing out textiles and abrasives, but by the early sixties, a sleepy city that its 170,000 citizens affectionately called “Wormtown.”

        In December of 1963, the United States was reeling from the traumas of the Kennedy assassination and growing opposition to the Viet Nam war.  And in Worcester, MA, the executives of the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester (now Hanover Insurance), detecting a critical drop in employee morale in the wake of an unpopular merger, asked Harvey Ball, a self-employed graphic artist and decorated World War II veteran, to design a button that would cheer up their cranky employees and improve customer relations.

         In his studio, Harvey thought about the project for a while.  Then he drew a circle with a grin.  “I made a circle with a smile for a mouth on yellow paper, because it was sunshiny and bright”, he told a reporter for the Associated Press some years later. He studied the image but then realized that if you turned it upside down, it became a frown.  That wouldn’t do at all!  What if the company’s employees wore the button upside down?   So Harvey added two eyes and the Smiley Face greeted a waiting world.

         Harvey drew the circle and the two non-matching eyes by hand because, as he explained later, “You can take a compass and draw a perfect circle and make two perfect eyes as neat as can be.  Or you can do it freehand and have some fun with it.  Like I did.  Give it character.“ (An authentic Harvey Ball Smiley has a hand-drawn circle, a crooked grin and one eye—the right—larger than the other.  Beware of too symmetrical imitations!)

         Worcester Mutual made 100 buttons for employees to wear and give to customers.  They disappeared overnight.  Then the company ordered 10,000 more.  Smiley was launched into the stratosphere and quickly circled the globe.

         Harvey Ball never received more than the $45 he was paid for his design, and by the time the insurance company tried to register Smiley eight years later, they learned that it was impossible, because, the image, reproduced 50 million times in the year 1971 alone, was by then in the public domain.

         Smiley instantly became a symbol of his times.  The baby boomer generation adopted and adapted him to represent their worldviews as they evolved through the years. When, in 1998, the US Postal Service asked the public to vote on which image best represented the decade of the1970’s, Smiley won by a landslide.

         The cheery Smiley Face postage stamp was issued by the post office on the first World Smile Day®, October 1,1999, in Smiley’s home town of Worcester, MA. The USPS issued a special cancellation for the event.  During the ceremony, Harvey Ball said that he believed Smiley “reflects what is inside every one of us – a smile is what we want to see when we look at another human being….We start to believe that we are too small to make a difference. But… the truth is that every one of us has the ability to make a difference every day.” 

         The USPS’s stamp supply sold out as quickly as the original Smiley buttons.

         Harvey Ross Ball, creator of the most famous American icon after the Stars and Stripes, was a true American hero, a decorated World War II vet awarded the Bronze Star for heroism during the Battle of Okinawa.  In the spring of 1945, during the deadly battle, which lasted for 82 days, when three of Ball’s  comrades were killed by a wayward shell as they stood next to him, he did not ponder whether fate had saved him for a greater destiny.  (But neither did he ever forget his fallen buddies. He painted their portraits in uniform from memory years later.)

         Harvey, a tall, laconic Yankee, born in 1921, was a solitary soul, not much given to, socializing, talking, or even smiling.  But when he died in 2001, he had figured out his purpose in life.  As he told People Magazine in 1998: “I taught the whole world how to smile.”  

          After Harvey died on April 12, 2001, at the age of 79, his son Charles told the media : “He was proud and pleased to have served his country and raise a family…He died with no apologies and no regrets.  His moral compass stayed on north and never wavered.”

        And he left us the legacy of a smile.

(Next:  The other guys who made millions from the Smiley Face.)

The Man Who Created the Smiley Face--The Harvey Ball Story

Because today (Oct. 3, 2014) is the 15th annual World Smile Day, I'm posting the story of Harvey Ball, the artist from Worcester, MA who created the original Smiley Face fifty years ago and never made more than $45 from his creation.  Then, in 1999, disturbed by the crass commercialization of the Smiley, Harvey created World Smile Day--the first Friday in October every year--to promote the true meaning of the Smiley Face.  So World Smile Day is the day to do a random act of kindness--improving the world "one smile at a time."

When three of Harvey Ball’s comrades were killed by a wayward shell as they stood next to him in Okinawa during World War II, he did not ponder if fate had saved him for a greater destiny.  Harvey, a tall, lanky, laconic Yankee from Worcester, Massachusetts, was not much given to introspection, socializing, talking, or even smiling.  But when he died in 2001 at the age of 79, Harvey had figured out his purpose in life.  As he told  People Magazine in 1998, “I taught the whole world how to smile.”

Harvey Ball, born and raised in Worcester, was the creator of the Smiley Face--that round yellow image that now beams out from Wal-Mart ads, Joe Boxer shorts and internet icons.  When, in December of 1963, he picked up a black pen and a yellow piece of paper and drew the world’s first Smiley Face, Harvey, a self-employed commercial artist, was working on an assignment from a Worcester insurance company suffering from employee discontent after a merger.  They wanted a campaign and buttons to raise company morale. They ordered 100 yellow Smiley Face buttons and then, when those disappeared almost over night, they ordered 10,000 more.

Harvey later figured out that his compensation for creating the Smiley Face button for the Worcester Mutual Insurance Company added up to about $45.   When the lawyers for the company tried to copyright the image eight years later, they learned that it was impossible, because the image, reproduced 50 million times in the year 1971 alone, was in the public domain.  By the mid-seventies, according to the curators of the Worcester Historical Museum, the image had fallen out of favor.

But Smiley made a significant comeback in the late 1980’s when interest in acid and other psychedelic drugs became a major cultural phenomenon. The icon was embraced by trendy downtown club kids.  Those who grew up in the 1970’s—today’s most desirable consumer demographic —view the image with nostalgia. (Some of them also think it was created by Forrest Gump, the fictional movie character.)  When votes were taken by the U.S. Post Office for icons to represent the decade of the 1970’s, the most popular image by far was Smiley, whose stamp was issued in 1999.

Brothers Murray and Bernard Spain of Philadelphia added the phrase “Have a Happy Day” and took in a reported one million dollars in sales of Smiley products in the first six months of 1971 alone.  In 1998, French Businessman Franklin Loufrani claimed that HE had created the image in 1971, and he proceeded to trademark the face in 80 countries.  When faced with Harvey Ball’s earlier creation, Loufrani replied with a Gallic shrug:  “I  don’t care if he designed the Smiley face.  We promote, we own, we market.” 

Riled up by “the France guy” as he put it,  Harvey in 1999 created World Smile Day—the first Friday in October-- to promote the true meaning of the Smiley Face.  And he trademarked it. Harvey said, “World Smile Day® is open to every person on the planet.  No matter what color they are, or who they might pray to, no matter what country they live in.  World Smile Day® simply asks each person to live the day with a generous heart, do one kind act, to help one person smile.  Acts of kindness and smiles are contagious."

Every reporter who interviewed Harvey Ball asked him the same question: was he angry that he never made more than $45 from the creation that could have made him very, very rich?  To every reporter he patiently gave pretty much the same reply: “Hey, I can only eat one steak at a time, drive one car at a time.  I’m not ticked off about it.  I don’t mind getting up in the morning and going to work. They ask me why I’m not upset.  I just get satisfaction from it being so widely used and that it has given so many people pleasure.”

Even though he didn’t want to profit from it, Harvey Ball did want recognition for creating the image whose smile has been called more famous than the Mona Lisa’s.   He said  “Smiley is one of the greatest pieces of art ever created, as simple as it is.  It’s got a very, very positive message. Anybody can use it and reproduce it and it reaches everybody regardless of language, religion, nationality, all those things--as compared to some of the art you get today which you haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re looking at…I’m glad Smiley came from Worcester.  The city should make more of it.  Because no other city has this.”

After Harvey died in 2001 in Worcester, his son, Charles, said : “He was proud and pleased to have served his country and raise a family…He died with no apologies and no regrets.  His moral compass stayed on northh and never wavered."

And he left us the legacy of a smile.

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)
» Enlarge photo

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)
Enlarge photo

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."

Ten Things you didn’t Know About the Smiley Face

     1. Smiley was created in Dec. 1963, in Worcester, MA by Harvey Ball, a commercial artist and decorated WWII veteran for an insurance company that wanted a button to improve company morale and customer service.

2. Harvey never made more than the $45 he was paid for the original design.  Others made millions selling Smiley merchandise, but U.S. courts have repeatedly ruled that  Smiley could not be copyrighted—he was in the public domain.

3. By the late 1970’s (and again in the U.K. in 1988) Smiley became the symbol of the drug culture, especially LSD and (later) ecstasy.

4. A blood-stained Smiley became the symbol (and cover image) of “Watchmen” which was first  a landmark comic book series, then the first graphic novel, and in March 2009, a blockbuster film

5.  Smiley became a movie star (or important symbol) not just in “Watchmen” but also in “Forrest Gump”, “My Own Private Idaho”, and a film called  “Smiley Face” (2007)  about a woman who accidently eats cupcakes laced with cannabis.

6.   In “Watchmen” some characters  fly to Mars, landing in a crater that looks like a Smiley Face.  There really is such a crater on Mars. It’s called the  Galle crater. 

7.  John Bon Jovi, in 2005, released a very successful album called “Have a Nice Day.”  In the video to the title song, is Bon Jovi’s  version of Smiley which is red, square and has threatening eyebrows and is taking over the world.

 8. The Smiley Face Murder Theory is a theory advanced by two New York detectives. They think that  a large number of young men found dead in bodies of water from the 1990’s to 2008 were victims of a serial killer or killers.  They think this because the detectives discovered Smiley Face graffiti on walls near locations where they think the killer dumped the bodies.

9.  Last Sunday an article in the New York Times Styles section said that the Smiley Face emoticon in e-mail  is becoming universal, spreading from teenagers and their texts to  serious business correspondence..

10. In December of 2013 the Worcester Historical Museum will celebrate Smiley’s 50^th birthday with lots of festivities.  They also  hope to publish a book on the history of Smiley.  Maybe written by me.