Crayola's creativity factory

It's part factory tour, part playtime. Both parents and kids can have hours of fun and learn something, too, at the Crayola Factory in Easton, Pa.

By MICHAEL SCHUMAN

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 30, 2000

[Photo: Michael Schuman] A young visitor to the Crayola Factory draws on a small screen, and the artwork is projected onto the wall.

Forget your parents' reprimand: "Don't write on the walls." Ignore your teachers' admonition: "Stay between the lines."

Instead, come to Easton, Pa., and write your name in letters as big as your bathtub on a 10-foot-high, curved wall of glass. Draw a picture of the family cat wearing a muu-muu, or concoct a mammoth mural of woolly mammoths.

The wall is the focal point of an exhibit called "Inside Out," amid numerous hands-on galleries in the Crayola Factory. Here, kids can draw with chalk on a simulated street corner, craft a finger puppet, project their designs on a blank wall, admire the 100- billionth Crayola crayon, and learn the favorite colors of Billy Crystal and Bryan Adams.

This place is part children's museum, part adult museum, part factory tour, part discovery center. It is also part of a plan to breathe life into downtown Easton, which forms the commercial center of the Lehigh Valley with Bethlehem and Allentown.

The complex opened in 1996 and welcomed its 1-millionth visitor in July 1999. This version of the Crayola Factory was a long time coming, replacing a mundane factory tour that operated for 20 years 6 miles away, at the headquarters of Binney & Smith, makers of Crayola crayons. According to Mary Ellyn Voden, factory executive director, the old tour had some difficulties.

"One was that for safety reasons we could not let in anyone under (age) 7, while the heart of our franchise is (ages) 3 to 8. The other was that we had 40,000 people a year who couldn't get in. Because of limited resources, there was a two-year waiting list. There were some hard feelings."

Most visitors now spend two to three hours at the new complex, but my family spent five hours there, much of it at an area called "Chalk Walk." The kids kneeled on an artificial sidewalk decked with a mailbox, parking meters and a newspaper box that dispenses chalk. They drew rainbows and houses while we stick-in-the-mud adults stood and watched a medley of vintage Crayola commercials on TV monitors.

When youngsters drew with markers in "Inside Out," we joined in beside them, enjoying the same guilty thrill of drawing on the wall next to their animals and rainbows and their names.

The "factory" portion of the Crayola Factory consists of two glass-enclosed production lines with guides offering blow-by-blow descriptions of how crayons and markers are made. Briefly, crayons are created by mixing hot wax and pigments in a flatbed molding table filled with thousands of crayon-shaped holes.

Each marker is assembled from five smaller pieces.

However, the crayons and markers made here will never be sold: The demonstrations are just for show, and the end products are yours to keep as souvenirs. Push a button, and a four-pack of crayons pops out. Push another, and a marker slides down a chute. Human nature being what it is, children (and adults) can be seen pushing buttons several times to take home handfuls of each. Visitors are on the honor system to take just one of each.

Near the production lines are the Crayola Hall of Fame and the Binney & Smith time line, the only real nods to name-brand promotion in the complex.

There is a wealth of trivia and oddities to amuse: In the hall of fame are the color-specked boots of Emerson Moser, who for 37 years made Crayolas, only to announce upon his retirement that he was colorblind. The 100-billionth Crayola was made not by Moser but by guest crayon craftsman and PBS star Fred Rogers, on Feb. 6, 1996. Its color is a one-time-only concoction called blue ribbon blue, and it is lovingly displayed in a plexiglass case.

In spite of his brush with pigment prominence and that special shade of blue, Mr. Rogers prefers lemon yellow, according to a list of celebrities and their favorite crayon colors. Other pet shades? Whoopi Goldberg leans toward magenta, Billy Crystal likes burnt siena and rocker Bryan Adams chooses denim.

Yet what kids will remember most from their visit is not reading about but playing with colors. When asked what young people should take home from their experience, spokeswoman Voden said, "We would love for kids to discover the importance of creativity, to see things in new ways. We would like them to know they can stick their necks out and break the rules."

Opportunities to do so are ample. Let your child fill a clear 1-inch slide with a colorful sketch, then see it projected onto a wall, giant-sized. You will swear you have seen the same works with Jackson Pollock's signature. Then give the kids free rein with buttons and track balls to project single-color circles of light onto a wall; let them overlap the red and yellow circles, for example, and prepare to hear gleeful shrieks of, "Awesome, orange!"

The newest addition here is the Color Garden, where those 5 and younger can pick multicolored fruit and veggies and check them out in a mock grocery store.

Want to see yourself in a whole new way? Head to a gallery called Cool Moves and dance, cavort, bounce and jounce in front of a video camera. Thanks to high-tech magic, your image is filled in with wild patterns and colors and projected onto a screen. A total of 256 colors can be on the screen here at any time.

And low-tech magic? That's what children have done with crayons for more than 90 years. When we visited, volunteers were helping little hands fashion finger puppets and headbands. Before leaving, kids can leave their marks here by making their own artworks and hanging them alongside others on superstructures of heavy wire.

-- Michael Schuman is a freelance writer who lives in Keene, N.H.

If you go

The Crayola Factory at Two Rivers Landing is in downtown Easton, Pa., a mile across the New Jersey line. Also in the building are the National Canal Museum and the Delaware-Lehigh Canal National Heritage Corridor visitor center.

Admission for the Crayola Factory and/or National Canal Museum: $7 ages 2 to 64, $6.50 ages 65 and older. Admission to the visitors center is free. Hours: Memorial Day-Labor Day, Monday-Saturday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; rest of year, Tuesday-Saturday 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday noon to 5 p.m.

To avoid overcrowding, admissions are first come, first served, and are time-coded. Summer is the busiest season: Expect to wait no longer than 15 to 30 minutes on all but the busiest days. Keep in mind that school groups often visit on weekday mornings.

For information: The Crayola Factory at Two Rivers Landing, 30 Centre Square, Easton, PA 18042-7744; (610) 515-8000; the Web site is http://www.crayola.com.

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