Colorful

By now you’ve read plenty about things we did as kids in the 1950’s, but I omitted a year-round activity for everyone. We colored. Yes, that’s right. We put those Crayola crayons to work both at home and at school. The internet tells me Edward Binney and C. Harold Smith invented them and first marketed them in 1903. Alice, Binney’s wife, named them, using a combination of the French word for chalk, craie, and oleaginous, suggesting oiliness. A five-cent box held eight colors: black, blue, brown, red, purple, orange, yellow and green.

I was never wildly enthusiastic about coloring, but I did plenty of it, especially during the winter months when it was too cold to do much outside. There were basically two coloring techniques. First, the solid color method, meaning we colored each part of the picture in one solid, heavily applied coat, like paint. The second method, my preference, was the shaded approach. I made a solid color outline of whatever section, then colored inside it with the same color, lightly applied. I liked this best, because the border kept messy me inside it, and I thought it prettier. I was never creative enough to use one color for the outline and a different one inside. That was above my pay grade.

Of course, coloring was impossible (or less fun) without those ubiquitous coloring books, sold in every dime store in America. I preferred the ones with thick, heavy outlines printed on sturdy paper, since I was prone to tearing it by accident. There were books about famous people like Shirley Temple, cartoon characters like Donald Duck, and movies like the “Wizard of Oz.” Animals graced plenty of books, too, although I grew bored with them—too much brown. A fancy, thick book sold for 25 cents, but there were plenty of choices in the ten-cent range. Never a cheap date, I preferred the pricier ones, and Mom was willing to spring for them. Her thoughts; “Anything to keep the kid busy!”

We used crayons at school as well as home, especially in the early grades. Although a box of 48 colors became available in 1948, our basic supplies for school held only a couple of rows. By junior high school, crayons had disappeared from our school supplies, even though boxes of 64 crayons graced store shelves by then.

As I raised my girls, crayons became very fancy. For the pre-school crowd, there were fat ones, easier for little hands to grasp. Some were even hexagonally shaped, less likely to roll off the tabletop. As the girls grew older, they could choose from fluorescent colors which glowed in the dark under black light, or scented ones. Those were discontinued; their smells were so authentic, some kids ate them! At one point there was a box with a crayon sharpener on the side—an innovation I considered brilliant.

These days, I imagine kids find coloring too boring and if they do it at all, it’s on fancy computers, using a stylus or figures from clip art. This Old School type isn’t sure what’s available out there, but I’m sure there are plenty of options for plenty of money. They call that progress, I guess.