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."
3 comments:
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