The Smiley Face: cheerful even on boxer shorts in nonstandard yellow.

Sanctum of the Smiley Face

Worcester, Massachusetts

No one buys insurance with a smile, especially not in Massachusetts in late 1963 in the wake of local hero John F. Kennedy's assassination. An insurance company in Worcester (pronounced Wooster) wanted to change that, so it hired a local artist, Harvey Ball, to make an employee button with a cheerful message. Rather than create something stiff and text-heavy ("Ask me how to make your future more secure!") Harvey took a sunny yellow circle, imagined that it was a face, and hand-drew on it a smile. Concerned that people might flip it into a frown, he drew a pair of simple eyes. The process, he later recalled, took about 10 minutes.

Harvey Ball poses in front of his ten-minute masterpiece.

The Smiley Face was a hit, bursting the boundaries of Worcester and insurance. It was embraced by hippies and then the rest of the world, and because the face was never trademarked it was applied to everything from town water towers to ecstasy tablets, and onto hundreds of varieties of Smiley Face buttons (Chicago's Button Museum has several display cases filled with examples). The Smiley Face eventually birthed the emoji, so we in the 21st century can communicate like 4,000-year-old Egyptians.

Since Smiley was everywhere, others claimed to be its creator (even Forrest Gump). To counter this, and with Harvey's help, the Museum of Worcester hosted its first Smiley Face retrospective in 1996, the same year that Walmart started slapping Smiley Faces on its employee uniforms and tried to claim ownership. The exhibit was popular; the museum Smiley population grew. "We acquired a lot of Smiley Faces," said Vanessa Bumpus, the museum Exhibit Coordinator. "The collection got so large, we needed a dedicated space." So an entire gallery was set aside for the Smiley Face -- all Smiley, all the time -- just outside of the museum restrooms. This reminded us of the placement of another Massachusetts institution, the original Museum of Bad Art, although the similarity was unintended.

The Smiley Death Star portrait and original Ball drafting table are two gallery highlights.

From trendy fashion to trash, the Smiley Face was everywhere.

Highlights of the collection include several of the earliest Smile buttons and the drafting table on which Harvey drew the original Smiley. A 2011 Star Wars portrait of a man standing in front of a Smiley Death Star is sometimes mistaken for Harvey, but it's actually television host Stephen Colbert, who had it painted in an attempt to get his portrait into the Smithsonian. Massachusetts artist Bob Thibeault donated it to the museum.

The "Have a Happy Day" Smiley: one of many copycats.

Showcases are crammed with a rotating collection of items emblazoned with the Smiley Face: mugs, golf balls, kitchenware, pet bowls, clocks, a Frisbee, a cocktail set, boxer shorts, shoes, bottle caps, a handbag, a trash can, playing cards, ear buds, neckties, and of course buttons. Many were produced by latter-day copycats; the gallery even includes some examples from Walmart. Vanessa said that displaying them was "part of the Smiley story" and in keeping with Harvey's live-and-let-live spirit. A poster on the wall shows how to identify a Harvey original, and visitors are encouraged to find them among the artifacts. "When people leave smiling," said Vanessa, "we know we've done our job."

Harvey Ball died in 2001 and is buried in Worcester under a Smiley Face tombstone. He told the Hartford Courant in 1998 that he'd been paid "about $45" to create the Smiley Face, and that he wasn't upset that others made millions while he did not. "I figured, 'If I make the world a little happier, okay, fine,'" he said. "I made the world smile."