Every year, smokers across the nation join the American Cancer Society’s Great American SmokeOut by smoking less or quitting for the day. The event aims to encourage people to stop using tobacco and to help people take effective steps to quit for good. The idea came from Arthur P. Mullaney of Randolph, Massachusetts. He asked people to give up cigarettes for a day and give the money they would have spent on cigarettes to a high school scholarship fund in 1971. Not long afterward, on November 18, 1976, the California Division of the American Cancer Society successfully prompted nearly one million smokers to quit for the day. That California event marked the first SmokeOut, and the Society took it nationwide in 1977.