Joyce Hall(1891–1982)

Joyce Clyde Hall was born at David City in Nebraska on the twenty-ninth of August 1891, third son of George Nelson Hall, a small-town Methodist minister and storekeeper, and Nancy Dudley Hall. The father had a chronic illness through Joyce's boyhood and the family was held together principally by the mother and the elder brother Rollie. Joyce left school at the eighth grade at fourteen to take up the family postcard-and-stationery business that the three Hall brothers (Rollie, William and Joyce) had founded as the Norfolk Post Card Company at Norfolk, Nebraska, in 1905. By 1909 in his eighteenth year he had decided that the postcard market was too small and too seasonal for the operation he wanted to build, and that the future lay in the larger, finer, picture-printed greeting-card market that the German lithographic firms had pioneered in the 1890s.

He arrived at Kansas City, Missouri, on the tenth of January 1910 in his nineteenth year with two shoeboxes of picture-postcard and greeting-card stock under his arm, took a room at the YMCA, and set up a wholesale greeting-card mail-order business from the room. By the end of the year his brother Rollie had joined him in Kansas City and the firm Hall Brothers was operating from a small Eleventh Street wholesale-office. He pioneered through the next decade the central business innovations on which the modern American greeting-card industry rested: the systematic illustrated wholesale catalogue (Hall Brothers issued the first illustrated greeting-card catalogue in 1912), the standard envelope-and-card display rack for the drugstore counter (introduced 1916), and the use of the firm's brand-name as the central retail-recognition signal (the Hallmark name was first used as a slogan in 1928 to indicate hand-finished gold-edged cards).

The firm survived a catastrophic fire at the Kansas City factory in 1915 (when the entire stock and equipment was destroyed and the brothers were three hundred thousand dollars in debt) by Joyce's purchase on credit of the engraving plates from the major American greeting-card competitor that had gone into receivership, and across the 1920s and 1930s grew into the dominant single firm in the American greeting-card industry. He bought out his elder brothers in 1926, renamed the firm Hallmark Cards in 1928, opened the first Hallmark-branded retail store in 1930, and through the 1930s consolidated the firm's position by acquiring the principal regional American greeting-card companies under the Hallmark name. By 1944 Hallmark was the largest greeting-card company in the world.

He founded the Hallmark Hall of Fame television-drama series on NBC in December 1951 (the original Christmas broadcast was Amahl and the Night Visitors, the Gian Carlo Menotti opera commissioned by the Hallmark Foundation specifically for the broadcast), and the series has been broadcast continuously for the next seventy-three years to the present, the longest-running primetime scripted television series in American history with eighty-two Emmy Awards and eleven Peabody Awards across its run. He developed across the 1950s and 1960s the Crown Center in downtown Kansas City, the eighty-five-acre office-residential-and-retail urban development that became the Hallmark world headquarters and the foundational example of the American downtown corporate-campus.

He retired from the chairmanship in 1966 but remained on the board until his death. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Lyndon Johnson in 1965, and the Horatio Alger Award in 1972. He died at Kansas City on the twenty-ninth of October 1982 in his ninety-second year. Hallmark Cards today remains a privately-held family company under the Hall family's third generation, operates in over a hundred countries, produces over ten thousand greeting-card designs annually, and is by every modern measure the largest greeting-card company in the world. The Hall name in modern American business carries the weight of the two shoeboxes of stock that arrived at Kansas City YMCA on the tenth of January 1910.