Joyce C. Hall and Hallmark

In nineteen ten, an eighteen year old named Joyce Clyde Hall stepped off a train in Kansas City with two boxes of picture postcards and not even enough money for a ride to the Y M C A. He sold those cards to drugstores and gift shops, and the business took off. In nineteen fifteen a fire destroyed his entire inventory, and he started over, soon printing his own greeting cards.

By nineteen twenty-eight he was selling them under the name Hallmark, a goldsmith's mark of quality that also echoed his own family name. Hallmark grew into the largest greeting card maker in the world, and Hall's later vision built Crown Center, a city within a city in downtown Kansas City. From a near penniless arrival, he turned the simple act of sending a card into an American institution headquartered in this town.