News

01 October 2009 - World Smile Day

01.10.2009
www.otkrytka.com

You may not know it, but today, Thursday October 1, 2009 is World Smile Day. And it arrives not a moment too soon, given our current anxieties and predicaments.

World Smile Day serves to commemorate the invention of the Smiley Face, which has humble origins when a Worcester, Massachusetts insurance company, State Mutual, merged with another company in 1963. The change had a deleterious effect on staff morale. In order to get employees to, if not actually be happy, than at least to project it, State Mutual launched a "friendship campaign." A local designer, Harvey Ball, was hired, and he drew up the smiley face image -- the yellow, smiling face -- in about ten minutes. Printed on buttons, the Smiley Face was an instant sensation. State Mutual was soon distributing Smiley Face buttons in the tens of thousands to customers and agents.

A few years later, Bernard and Murray Spain, two brothers known for launching fads, got a hold of the Smiley Button, copyrighted it, and added the crucial words "Have a nice day." Soon Smiley was everywhere -- on buttons, posters, t-shirts, bumper stickers, and key chains. By 1971 more than 50 million buttons were sold and Smiley became one of the iconic images of the 1970s and beyond. "Mr. Speaker, there are few symbols which so fully represent the American spirit of friendship, happiness and peace as the smiley face," U.S. Representative Jim McGovern said in the Congressional Record in celebrating first annual World Smile Day on October 1, 1999.