MEMORY LN MUSEUM | Archival Series There is a face that has watched over the twentieth century like a benevolent sun. It has no nose. It has no eyebrows. It has no opinion, no politics, no grief — and yet it has absorbed all of those things. It is butter-yellow and aggressively cheerful, and for sixty-plus years it has refused to leave. This is the secret history of the Smiley Face: one of the most widely recognised and reproduced graphics of the modern era, and perhaps the most quietly complicated one. A Ten-Minute Miracle: Worcester, Massachusetts, 1963 The story begins, as so many American origin myths do, with a mundane corporate problem. In December of 1963, the State Mutual Life Assurance Company in Worcester, Massachusetts was struggling with staff morale following a series of mergers. Management wanted something simple to lift spirits — a small button, maybe, something employees could wear. They hired a local commercial artist named Harvey Ball to design it. Ball complete...