America’s Brightest Hall of Fame

We smelled it as soon as we left the oppressive Pennsylvania humidity outside and swooshed through the cool glass doors into the revitalizing air-conditioned low brick building.

“Crayons,” my wife said. She always says things like that before I do.

This nasal nostalgia triggered a rainbow of reminiscences: my first Christmas crayons and coloring book, the shopping sprees for the opening day of classes all through grade school and the comfortable, colorful clutter of books and chopped-up crayons around the house as my children were growing up.

We had entered the Crayola Hall of Fame in the Binney & Smith corporate complex nestled in a high rolling meadow close by the New Jersey border.

It was a timely visit because, for the first time in history, eight traditional tones were to be retired and a similar number added to the colorful contingent for the first time since 1972.

To make room for the new hot hues--dandelion, wild strawberry, vivid tangerine, fuchsia, teal blue, royal purple, jungle green and cerulean--the traditional tints of maize, raw umber, blue gray, lemon yellow, green blue, orange red, orange yellow and violet blue were ensconced in the hall of fame.

I lobbied for the enshrinement of a violet orange I developed when an old crayon melted in my water color set long ago. But I couldn’t get enough weighted votes.

The move to modernity was made last summer after interviews with Crayola’s major consumers--kids--revealed a need for brightness among the 72 official corporate colors.

We asked our guide, a retired Crayola craftsman, if there was any move to add a scent to the product. “Are you kidding?” was the response. Studies show that crayons are among the 20 most-recognized scents in America. Coffee and peanut butter top the list. And the most popular, the 32-color Crayola carton, is to coloring what Coke is to soda pop.

While the scent is readily recognizable, it isn’t easily discovered. Plan to add at least 30 minutes for getting lost when you book an appointment for a tour of the coloring complex. The directions and map accompanying confirmation of your tour aren’t much help. Be prepared to ask local residents how to get to the Binney & Smith plant.

You do need an appointment despite the fact the company does not advertise its tours. “We get more than 30,000 people from around the world coming through here every year,” our guide said, “and we’re booked three to four months in advance.” Since we took the tour, bookings have increased to a current backlog of nine months for large groups.

Inside, it’s almost disappointing to see how such colorful pieces of my life could be the product of such a small, spotless and constantly clattering plant. It was like discovering that Santa’s workshop is in a carport.

Workers do have an elfin quality in the care and concern they show in making sure all those Crayolas have straight labels and perfectly pointed tips. My palms itched and ached to rake over those pristine-pointed columns of color.

While there are more than half a million Crayolas on the floor at any one time, there are only a dozen or so workers, most of them gray-haired, each operating four clackety-clacking molding and packing machines. They produce 1 billion Crayolas a year. Another billion are produced at plants in Kansas, Canada and England.

Color is splattered all over as paraffin is recycled in large globs, colorful paper sleeves await the cylindrical sticks of color and the familiar orange-and-green boxes of various sizes house the hundreds of thousands of Crayolas ready for shipment to more than 60 nations.

Crayolas have rolled out of this site since the first eight-color pack was produced in 1903 and sold for a nickel. The trade name Crayola derives from the French word craie for chalk and the Latin oleum for oil. Crayolas are made of paraffin and pigment. A crayon is the generic term for a colored writing stick. Anything else you ever wanted to know about Crayola and crayons can be obtained by writing to the company or by visiting.

The one person I hunted for but never found: the inspector who checks for crayons that stay inside the lines.

GUIDEBOOK

Crayola Tours

Getting there: Most major airlines fly into Philadelphia, 55 miles away, and shuttles serve the regional ABE Airport, just 16 miles from Easton, not far from Allentown.

Where to stay: The Sheraton at ABE Airport and in Easton. Just six miles west of Easton, in Bethlehem, is a Holiday Inn.

Where to eat: A few miles north of Easton is the Widow Brown’s, an excellent roadhouse with its own special version of the Philadelphia steak sandwich.

For more information: Contact Binney & Smith, Crayola Products Tours, 1100 Church Lane, P.O. Box 431, Easton, Pa. 18044-0431, (215) 559-2632, for details or an appointment for the free 60-minute tour. Children must be at least 6 years old to tour the plant. Also: Easton Chamber of Commerce, (215) 253-4211, or the Lehigh Valley Convention & Visitors Bureau, (215) 266-0560.