Smiley

[Grant Barrett]

On 24 March 1998 Barry wrote:

>SMILEY Cecil Adams has covered the history of the smiley face
>in his "Straight Dope" column (an archive is on AOL).  The yellow
>"Have a Nice Day" smiley dates from about 1970, but there were
>earlier, similar ones in the 1960s. For those who have been to
>Hartford, CT, you may have seen the yellow smiley on top of a
>building there, just a few blocks from the Mark Twain and Harriet
>Beecher Stowe houses.  That smiley dates from the early 1960s.
>In the Wall Street Journal, 17 November 1958, pg. 10, cols.1-2,
>an ad for St. Regis Paper (it ran on other dates also) shows "THE
>MANY FACES OF ST. REGIS PLYWOOD." It's a smiley. :-)

And on 27 November 2000 he wrote:

>May 1936, RESTAURANT MANAGEMENT, pg. 366, col. 1.  An ad for Calumet
>Baking Powder shows a chef making the sign.  "_Voila!_  What would
>you expect!  _Of course_, the FRENCH LINE uses Calumet!" (On the
>same page, col. 2, is an A-1 Sauce ad that shows something very
>close to the "smiley"--ed.)

And today I read from the Associated Press:

http://www.boston.com/news/daily/13/smiley.htm

>Harvey R. Ball, whose simple drawing of a smiling face on a yellow
>background became a cultural icon, died Thursday after a short
>illness. He was 79. Ball, who co-owned an advertising and public
>relations firm in Worcester, designed the Smiley Face in 1963
>to boost the morale of workers in two recently merged insurance
>companies.

So, I know this is outside of word-related tasks, but do we have (as they say in
patent research) prior art on this? Something concrete before 1963?

--
Grant Barrett
New York loves you back.
http://www.worldnewyork.org/