Collection Gives Him a Lot to Smile About

Now we know what became of all those sappy smiling yellow faces after they were abused out of circulation in the early 1970s.

They died and found a happy heaven in Bruce Woodbury’s bedroom.

Woodbury, 25, a San Francisco resident who is otherwise in control of his faculties, has a quirky ambition. He wants to be “the man of 1,000 faces.” Literally.

He has 750 artifacts of the smile that darkened as many moods as it brightened. He has a smiley-face cookie jar, cat dish, cuff links, playing cards, coffeepot and cups, coasters, clock and car mat. That is just the C’s.

In the B category, he has 300 different smiley-face buttons.

Risky Business

These he displays in his job as an auto parts salesman, although wearing a smiley-face button is risky in this line of work.

“Some people do hate them,” Woodbury admits, “but it’s really a harmless thing. I get the connotation that people think it’s tacky. But that’s OK. I have a generally tacky personality.”

It takes something major to irritate Woodbury. Like a smiley face with a nose on it. “I draw the line at noses,” he says.

Another annoyance is the desecration of the symbol. Smiley-face T-shirts with bloody bullet holes and blown-out brains he can handle. “But the whole thing got overblown when they started putting smiley faces on toilet brushes,” he says. “That was its downfall. People got sick of it.”

Woodbury first put on a happy face in 1982, a year after he graduated from high school. He bought a motor scooter and fancied himself a “mod,” after the British subculture of the early ‘60s.

In mod lingo, a “face” is someone cool. Thus evolved the Smiley Face Scooter Club. Riding two abreast, they cruised the streets of his native San Mateo, wearing mod suits highlighted by a yellow smiley button on each narrow lapel.

Gets a Lot of Ribbing

“You get a lot of ribbing from people in four-wheel-drive trucks,” he says. “Girls in Camaros aren’t too impressed, either. So you delve into your group a little more.”

His parents, who operate a San Jose printing shop, have a better understanding.

“Bruce collects things that nobody else wants,” says his mother, Janet. “He doesn’t mind being 10 or 15 years behind the times.”

Shortly after founding the Smiley Face Scooter Club, the smiley man decided one button wasn’t enough. He needed 100. That came easy, back in 1983.

Then he went for 200 buttons, and further into the smiley underworld of night lights and yo-yos, golf balls, key rings, pencil sharpeners, lunch bags, lamp shades and full breakfast sets. He had the market cornered and moved his bed into the dressing room to establish his bedroom as a smiley shrine.

Fad Has Resurfaced

In late 1988, the fad resurfaced. A London nightclub movement called “acid house” adopted the insignia. It embodied the happy disposition of kids stoned to the rafters on the drug ecstasy, trance-dancing till dawn. T-shirts began appearing with the innocent face on the front and subtle messages on the back, such as “Have a Nice Trip.”

Woodbury doesn’t mind being thought of as weird, but he would prefer that the drug culture stay away from his fetish.

“I like it that the smiley faces are coming back,” he says, “but it’s sad that people think everyone who has a smiley face now is a drug addict.”

Now the market has tightened. An original smiley water glass has inflated from 50 cents to $5, and a plastic garbage can is up from 69 cents to $25.

Smiley-Face Boutique

Oversize pink smiley T-shirts, complete with shoulder pads, are now available in clothing stores at the Stonestown mall. There is a smiley-face boutique in Macy’s New York, and the design has appeared in at least one back yard satellite dish.

The symbol has attached itself to the ‘60s fashion revival. San Francisco button maker Mark Rodman produced the first smile button in 1968, but there is no hard evidence that any self-respecting hippie ever wore one before 1970.

“Overall, the ‘70s were just really boring, and the smiley face will be the most prominent representation of the decade,” Woodbury says. “But the fad will die fairly quickly.”