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What color is China?
(by Ed Flynn - July 16, 2008)
Sometimes I forget what a deprived childhood my generation had. No plastics, no TV, no computers, no electronic games. And now I just came across this story in the papers about how the Smithsonian Institute down in
Washington has a box of 64 Crayola Crayons in its Americana Artifacts display. Sixty-four colors? Where did they all come from? Seems to me that when I was a kid we only had about half a dozen crayons. So I picked up the phone and called Binney & Smith, the people who make Crayolas.
Turns out that sixty-four colors is nothing. That’s only the number in the box introduced back in 1958, which is the box the Smithsonian decided to enshrine. In 1972 the number of available colors jumped to 72 and the current “Big Box,” offers a crayon palette in an astounding 96 nuances of coloration.
“So how many different colored crayons did Crayola actually make back in the 1930s when I was going to school?” I asked the pleasant sounding press relations lady on the other end of the phone.
“Let’s see now…” she said and I could hear her turning pages in some company reference manual. “Ah, here we are. In the 1930s we only made crayons in the eight primary colors; black, blue, brown, green, orange, red, violet and yellow.”
And now they make ninety-six colors? Hard to believe. So I asked the Crayola Lady to give me an idea of what some of them were and she read from a list which started with Apricot and ended with White with “colors” like Bittersweet and Periwinkle, Goldenrod and Thistle sprinkled in between.
Seems to me we managed fairly well with our eight measly, drab primary colors back when I was in fifth grade at the Washington School in Bergenfield. Not that I was much of an artist. The only way you could tell a dog from a horse when I drew one was if I printed the word “dog” on the page and drew an arrow pointing to the four-legged stick figure.
When it came to coloring in maps, however, I excelled. Geography was one of my favorite subjects and when the teacher handed out those outline maps and told us to color them in and label the continents and countries or the individual states here in America I would be careful to stay within the lines and I would daydream of someday traveling to those far-off places and seeing them for myself.
The oceans were always blue, of course, which left only seven colors for the rest of the world, but that was enough. You just had to be careful that two countries or states with the same color didn’t share a common border. The “Four Corners” in the United States were tricky. That’s where Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and
Arizona meet. Over in Europe countries like Switzerland could be a problem because they’re like an island surrounded by many other countries. It was by coloring in those maps that everyone learned Italy was shaped like a boot and you could see how once-upon-a-long-time-ago Africa and South America were probably joined and Alaska formed a land bridge to
Asia which the Native Americans could walk across.
Strangely enough, I found myself thinking of those maps only the other day for another reason that had nothing to do with crayons. One of my grandchildren asked me if I could name all 50 states. I immediately said, “yes” but when he called my bluff I found it harder than I thought it would be. Then I remembered those maps in the fifth grade and I tried to visualize one in my mind, running from Maine south to Florida and back up along the Mississippi to the
Great Lakes and so on. While I may have gotten a few of them in the wrong place – is Nebraska above
Kansas or is it the other way around? – I eventually came up with all 48. Then, of course, I realized that there are now 50. Alaska and
Hawaii weren’t states when I was in school.
Which got me thinking about something else I read recently in one of the news magazines. Apparently someone gave a test to a group of college students and a lot of them thought Europe was a country rather than a continent and even with all the publicity about the coming summer Olympics in Beijing many of them couldn’t find China on a map. Now I think I know why. It’s probably because they couldn’t concentrate on things like that when they were in fifth grade. They were too confused trying to decide what color crayon to use.
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