A Half-Hearted History of Crayons
I recently read “Color Capital of the World”, a supposed history of what it was like growing up in a family that founded one of a number of crayon and blackboard/marking chalk companies, specifically American Crayon. I call it half-hearted because the author, John Whitworth Kropf, is clearly not a historian. And after finishing the book, his relationship with the company is vaguely tangential at best, and appears to have been that way for most of his life. If I were to describe the book in one word, it would be “superficial”. You are going to see that word a lot in the rest of this piece, so you’ve been warned.
Not A Historian
The writing itself is workmanlike, but not particularly engaging. It isn’t exactly a page turner, but it isn’t a dull recitation of facts. It would be nice, actually, if the book had more facts. The work itself is rife with speculative questions which the author makes no attempt to answer. There are many, many statements such as “perhaps this event inspired this person to invent such-and-such” or “maybe this technology was the inspiration for some other thing”. Rather than try to track down the answer, or at least say “I tried to find the answers, but couldn’t”, we get nothing. Just the open-ended “what-if” statements and then he moves on.
The fact the author is in no way a historian, amateur or otherwise, is clearly obvious in how he handled taking possession of a desk. He came into possession of a partner’s desk (one of those monster desks where two people sit facing each other) that was purchased by the founders of American Crayon sometime in the 1850’s. His great-great-great grandfather and great-great-great uncle would have sat at it, across from each other in the earliest years of the company. The family members that would come to run the company in subsequent years did as well. The desk has history, and it would have very likely borne the marks and patina of that history.
Because it was basically an old desk (as in about 150 years old) in rough condition, he had it restored, refinished, and had the leather pad in the center replaced. But before this, did the author have the desk carefully and professionally documented? Did he ask a historian to go over it, making notes on any unusual markings, scribblings, or other evidence of use? Did he at least take his own photos of every inch of the desk to preserve its state? Was the restoration process recorded and documented? Nope. He basically saw an old piece of furniture with some notion of family history and had it restored to new. Instead of being considered an important artifact of what the book seems to imply is an important company, it was instead treated as a trivial piece of decoration.
His late mother was in possession of a large number of company artifacts and records as well. They aren’t in a museum as far as I know. The author kept some, may have thrown out some, and put the rest in storage. As far as I know, they’re still in a self-storage facility, instead of being in some museum being properly preserved and curated. It is entirely possible that these historical artifacts will be lost because of indifference.
There’s No Payoff
The narrative itself is something of a letdown. There’s no payoff. It reads like one of the less rigorous Wikipedia articles one finds out there. And the author didn’t work for the company. Neither did his parents, or at least for any period of time or in any meaningful capacity. Instead we get brief tales of having lots of new crayons as kids, and a few anecdotes about the company and Sandusky, Ohio, the so-called “Color Capital of the World”. It would appear, based on the limited evidence presented by the author, that it was a self-imposed title, not one bestowed upon it by others.
At one point, the author is talking about his decision to move to Washington, DC and take a job as a lawyer with the US Justice Department. I thought “ok, this is the point he decides to reconnect with the family firm, and try to take it somewhere”. Nope. Off he goes.
He comes into possession of his mother’s company artifacts, and I’m thinking “cool, this is where he sets aside his law practice and founds a museum to American Crayon, because they were supposedly important”. Nope. It’s a couple of sentences of him treating it like any other pile of random junk inherited from relatives.
During one of his visits to Sandusky, after interring his mother in one of the historic cemeteries, he meets with and talks with the city leaders (whom he bumps into a coffee shop), and they discuss the revival of the area. I’m thinking “awesome, this is where he moves back to his hometown, leverages his DC connections, and helps with the revival”. Nope. He heads home, sends an email a few years later to see how things are going, and finds out the revival may be short-lived, and we hear nothing about it again.
What we do get a brief discussion (lamentation?) about how the only apparently innovative family members were the ones that founded the company. After that, it’s a bunch of caretakers. And he discusses his choice, and the choice of other family members, to take “safe” jobs, and not take chances. And that’s it. Okay, and? Seriously, that’s it? Then what was the point of this entire piece of work? “Ooo, I have a connection to this now-defunct company that may or may not have mattered in some way”.
Is The Company Important or Not?
I can’t tell if American Crayon was important or not. Based on the fact that the company itself was subsumed and disappeared functionally in the 1960’s, and its last branded product was changed to another brand in the 1970’s, I’d be tempted to say no. The book talks a lot, well speculates a lot, about the importance of the wax crayon on modern education. But it offers no evidence that American Crayon itself, or the wax crayon in general, really mattered. I can’t tell if the crayon, or the company mattered to the author, or had in impact on the author, in any way.
Sure, the company published magazines and attended educational conferences. The need for better chalk for classroom blackboards was part of the inspiration for one of the company co-founders to invent something better than the raw Dover chalk that was typically used. But the fact that the company was in the same town as a progressive and innovative high school seemed coincidental, not transformative. And all the other companies making school art supplies did the exact same thing. It isn’t like American Crayon was the one leading the charge.
And it turns out that the company wasn’t the first to invent a better chalk for blackboards and for marking other surfaces. A company in Waltham, Massachusetts had invented one years before. It turns out dozens of companies did. American Crayon wasn’t truly the first, let alone dominant, in any particular area of visual art supplies. Their watercolours came from a company in Germany. They basically imitated everyone else’s pastels, and made more-or-less the same tempera paint as everyone else. At some point, American Crayon bought the company in Waltham, although it was treated in a single paragraph. No discussions, no ‘should we or shouldn’t we’ with management, no push-back from the other company. Just “they bought them” and we move on.
The company wasn’t the largest employer in Sandusky, didn’t seem to be instrumental in its early growth and development, and seemed to have little or no influence over what happened in the region. The family wasn’t the wealthiest, the most active in the community, nor was it the most influential. It wasn’t clear if the family had any influence on the area at all. When the factory was finally shut down in 2002, it wasn’t clear if that was a cause of the decline of Sandusky, or merely a symptom.
A visit by Walter Chrysler, and the subsequent appearance of colour choice on Chrysler cars, warrants a minor anecdote and nothing more. Chrysler’s use of vivid colours in their cars in the 1920’s was (maybe?) enough to force Ford to offer something other than black, but that’s a statement not really backed by any evidence offered by the book. We also don’t know if his visit to American Crayon was transformative, and an important part of that decision. The author apparently couldn’t be bothered to talk to Stellantis historians and archivists to maybe find out. It’s one of those “well, maybe it played a part” speculative statements that pervade the book. That’s where a real historian steps in, and chases down the thread.
Mentioned from time to time is what appears to be a truly important company in the space, Binney & Smith (now Crayola LLC), with their legendary Crayola brand. Sure, some local Sandusky schools used American Crayon products out of local pride, but go beyond that small area, and it doesn’t sound like there was a huge, knock-down, drag-out battle between the companies for mindshare and market share in the educational or recreational space.
Instead, it sounds like, through inference, that American Crayon rode in the shadows of Crayola. Crayola still exists, as a wholly-owned but independent subsidiary of Hallmark Cards. American Crayon branded products disappeared sometime in the 1970’s, the product having been shifted to the Prang brand owned by Dixon Ticonderoga, the eventual owner of American Crayon company.
Here’s a telling bit of evidence, such as it is: when you look up the Wikipedia article on the crayon, there is a single reference to American Crayon, and nothing else about the company. The bulk of the article is about Crayola from the 19th century onward. The article mentions there were an estimated 300 companies making crayons at different points in history.
Superficial Anecdotes
Everything in the book is largely that superficial. A 30-day cross-country road trip in the 1920’s from Sandusky to Pasadena is reduced to a few pages. It was a huge undertaking, likely worthy of a book of its own. But it is almost trivialized, even though it was supposedly transformative for the great-great uncle that undertook it before becoming president of the company.
Purchasing other companies amount to footnotes in the narrative. The end of the company is covered in a handful of pages. I still don’t know, from the book, if the original factory was demolished or not. I’d have to find that out myself.
The family dynamic was equally vague. The author claims the family always got along (unlikely, even in the most agreeable families) and never fought (improbable to say the least). What they did while running the company is lacking in detail, and what they did outside the company is equally nebulous. In over a century of operation, surely something of note happened once in a while.
The author’s own emotional connection to the company is tenuous at best. The one thing he did, beyond writing the book, was to order some vintage American Crayon sets off of eBay. If this was so important to capture in a book, how is it the author had almost no company artifacts of his own, let alone at least some crayons of his own from the past.
There aren’t extensive interviews with others with connections to the company. There doesn't appear to be any review of newspaper articles from Sandusky to gain insight into the company’s real impact on the region, nor any review of the materials his mother had retained. It’s a superficial work by a non-historian giving a superficial look into a company that may have an interesting history, but I can’t tell because of how, well, superficial the whole thing is.
And for a book that is supposed to be about growing up within that company, there’s little to indicate it mattered. The author could have grown up in any number of upper-middle income families in any number of midwest towns, and come out the same. The impact of the company on him personally appears minimal at best. His association with the company didn’t influence his decision to eventually become a lawyer, and it doesn’t appear he ever once even thought of working at the place. Nor did it seem to be the reason he moved away. Instead it looks as if his summer job at Vulcan Metals had more do with it. If living in a family that made crayons had any meaningful influence or impact, there was no way to discern it, at least not from the book.
Can’t Recommend The Book
Unless you are an avid crayon history aficionado, or are looking for anything vaguely related to Sandusky, Ohio, I can’t recommend this book for anyone else. It isn’t insightful in what it took to build a successful company (that made some of the family wealthy) in the mid-19th century. It tells us nothing about what it took to build and grow that company over the 100 plus years it existed as an independent entity. And we learn nothing about the company’s downfall, with lessons on how others might avoid the same fate. The people in it are ciphers, cardboard cutouts with no meaningful depth. The importance of the company isn’t clear, if it mattered at all, in education, in the industry, or to the author. Save yourself the trouble. You won’t learn much from it, and there are better and more informative sources of information if you want to know more about crayons in general.