from “Color Capital of the World”

John W. Kropf | Color Capital of the World: Growing Up with the Legacy of a Crayon Company | University of Akron Press | 2022 | 146 Pages

By the 1980s, the once state-of-the-art American Crayon factory was well past its prime. It was still using molds and other equipment that had been custom-made, dating back to 1904. The manufacturers of the equipment had long since gone out of business. If machinery broke, replacement parts often had to be custom-made in the factory’s maintenance shop. The maintenance staff became critical to keeping the factory running. Old-timers had to transfer knowledge to new staff so they could understand how the intricate machinery operated and how to fix it. Certain staff took on specialties with the factory’s machine shop, which served as critical center for constant repairs.

One of the longtime maintenance men, Irvin Baker, mastered the machines that made the chalk pencils. Irvin passed on his stories to his grandson, Ben Baker. The pencils started as cylinders of chalk with layers of paper wrapped around it. A thin string ran along the chalk to tear the paper along a finely perforated edge, exposing a small edge of chalk. The machinery for this was intricately balanced with delicate moving parts. Baker studied the machines and their quirks and learned how they worked. If the chalk machine operator reported something amiss—not enough string measured out, or the paper crooked, or the chalk too short—Baker knew how to adjust it and get the operation back to normal. The factory building itself was aging. Forklifts, which did not exist when the factory was built, carried heavy pallets of color products. The floor sagged and, in some places, wore through. The maintenance department bolted over the weak spots with large steel plates they called “diamond plates.” Thousands of feet of pipe wrapped in 1904-era fire- retardant asbestos had to be carefully painted over every year to contain the dangerous material.

The factory was powered by a coal-fired boiler. The fueling process had become hazardous for the maintenance men who had to climb a ladder up to the coal elevator perched on stilts above the boiler room to service the boiler.

Ben Irvin recalled one of his grandfather’s stories in which the plant engineer, Russ Herner, had a preference for a distinct shade of light green and required that any equipment coming into the factory be painted that shade. Through his grandfather, Ben had received one of the cast-off drill presses painted that particular shade of green and continued to use it in his own shop.

During the years Ben’s grandfather worked at American Crayon, the factory kept on producing, wearing itself to a nub without new equipment. Irvin’s fellow workers developed an admiration for the machine shop’s ability to keep the old equipment operating while patching the place together with “spit and chicken wire.”

Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and until the end, American Crayon still held up its reputation of being a family company. Baker’s daughter worked on the second floor of the main factory building, running the packaging machines by feeding handfuls of each color crayons into a hopper that fed them down into packaging boxes. Baker’s son, Ed, worked for years in what was called the “lead plant,” where No. 2 Yellow graphite pencils were made under the Dixon Ticonderoga brand. Baker’s son, Steve, worked in the receiving department.

•

The crayons had a magic about them that consistently energized family memories, not just mine. Ben Baker, who recalled his own stories about the factory told many times by his grandfather, mother, and uncles. Ben’s grandfather talked so often about the men in the maintenance department he could recite their names by heart: “Vince, Mooch, Henry, theforeman John Camella, became as familiar to me as old friends, though I had never met them.” Like me, he enjoyed a bounty of free crayons, paints, or chalk as a kid.

Among his most vivid memories of his grandfather, Ben Baker remembers the sight of his grandfather’s hands as he sat at the supper table, “the lines in them blackened with grease and grime that not even Lava soap could wash out. It would be a good while after his retirement that the last of those dark lines finally faded away.” It seemed somehow symbolic that the factory had literally gotten into his grandfather’s skin. As the factory grew older, it seemed to shed artifacts as if it were aware of its age and sought to leave behind evidence of itself. The American Crayon employees seemed to understand this. When equipment was replaced or worn out, Irvin Baker would bring home electric motors, an antique air compressor, old hardwood filing cabinets, a 1930s-era Royal typewriter, finger-jointed wooden boxes, and industrial light fixtures. Irvin even brought home brass shavings from the machine shop lathes, copper wiring, and pipe.

In 1984, Bryn Mawr Corporation merged with American Crayon’s parent company, Joseph Dixon Crucible, to form Dixon Ticonderoga. The new company began a series of negotiations meant to reassure American Crayon’s workers that the Sandusky plant would continue to operate.

A decade later, under President Clinton, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. This reduced labor and trade barriers gave the US access to less expensive labor.

Despite the outdated facility, the plant manager, Jim Alexander, told the Toledo Blade he believed they had made the highest-quality product. But the age of the factory with its coal-powered heat had become very expensive and required a lot of maintenance. Without any upgrade to the factory or the machinery, the decision to close must have been apparent even to the maintenance men.

Roger Bibler, a shipping and receiving clerk and president of the union local representing the workers, said the factory was closing because of the greed of management taking advantage of NAFTA. Local civic leaders lobbied Dixon Ticonderoga to apply for Ohio air-quality incentives to install gas heat instead of coal, but Dixon had made its decision. Irvin Baker formally retired in 1994 but continued on as a consultant. His knowledge of the old machines had been vital to keeping them working, but now he was in the business of knowledge transfer. Dixon Ticonderoga made the decision to move machinery to Canada and Mexico. Management brought some of the Mexican workers to the Sandusky factory and asked if the Sandusky workers would train their replacements, but most refused. Baker was one of the few who saw it through to instruct the new operators about the care and feeding of the old machinery.

The day the factory ceased production, Roger Bibler said in a 2018 interview, “Our oldest man walked out of there after fifty-one or fifty- two years, and cried like a baby.” According to Bibler, he never purchased another Dixon Ticonderoga pencil after that day.

Eventually, all the operations were progressively moved out of the Sandusky factory. When the last old machines were moved to a facility in Mexico in 1997, Baker retired for good.

In its official history, Dixon Ticonderoga marked 1995 as the 160th anniversary of American Crayon and the eightieth anniversary of the Old Faithful trademark, but there was no celebration in Sandusky. In 2002, the Hayes Avenue factory officially closed its doors, 130 years after William Curtis started baking chalk in the family oven. American Crayon had once been the largest and oldest employer in Sandusky.

The closing of the crayon factory was also felt at the Station House, a restaurant and bar across the street. Sally Bagley, a cook for thirty-five years at the restaurant known for decades as Ev’s Corner, told the local press, “I’m going to say it’ll be hard on us.” The restaurant had been filled at capacity with the plant employees, but its regulars had dwindled to about half a dozen workers for lunch.

The relocated factory in Mexico later went bankrupt. I imagine that the intricate machinery had given its final effort, but that the move a thousand miles south was too much for it. Perhaps there was some small irony at work on the equipment from the American Crayon Company. It was not meant to operate anywhere else but Sandusky, Ohio, USA.

•

Over the years, Sandusky would occasionally be the punch line for jokes. We did not get the brunt of them like our older sibling Cleveland and its legacy of the Burning River and “the mistake on the lake,” but I thought the city got more than its share, considering its modest size. In 1980, National Lampoon editor and Toledo, Ohio, native P. J. O’Rourke published The King of Sandusky, Ohio, a parody of a medieval struggle using Sandusky’s blandness as a foil. The next year, an Omni Magazine movie review of Outland, an outer space movie set on a grim mining colony on one of Jupiter’s moons, described the setting as “dismal as Sandusky, Ohio.” My first thought was I wanted to punch this wise-guy reviewer in the nose.

I knew Sandusky had none of the quaintness of the New England town common or the luxurious, sunny climate of Southern California. Yes, it carried a raw and pallid three-season grayness of any small-sized Midwestern industrial town, but I knew we still carried the title Color Capital of the World. The hard part was that no one in the present world remembered the distinction. I was not certain the last time anyone used the phrase.

Like-minded citizens, proud of Sandusky’s heritage, formed a group in 1983 called Friends of the Boeckling, which financed an effort to rescue the Boeckling from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, where it had been used as a floating warehouse and machine shop. The community raised money to restore the old ship, but the project ended in disaster when the Boeckling was destroyed by a fire as she sat at a mooring in Toledo’s Maumee River in 1989. Arson was suspected in the early morning fire. Somehow it seemed sadly symbolic for the difficult time Sandusky had entered. A core of history-minded Sanduskians had sought to save the city’s past, but their good intentions met with a tragic end.

•

More Sandusky companies closed their doors. After American Crayon, one of the city’s oldest employers, Hinde and Dauch Paper Company, ceased operations in Sandusky in 1981. Nearby Scott Paper Company, which made paper towels and toilet paper, closed its factory in 1980. Scott Paper had sponsored an academic high school competition for Erie County called Hi-Q (I was on the team for Huron High School). The west end of Sandusky’s waterfront had become a grimy collection of shuttered factories, warehouses, and crumbling docks. The Sandusky Foundry and Machine Company, the only remaining foundry, still operated at a reduced size for a parent company in Wisconsin making specialized metal alloys.

Ferrell-Cheek Steel Company closed in 1983 after seventy-three years of operation. Barr Rubber Products, which had returned to making recreational balls and toys and rubber components for boats and automobiles after World War II, suffered. The factory closed in 1986 due to declining sales. The closures were miniature versions of what our big siblings of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit were undergoing.

At about the same time, the metals company, Vulcan Materials, where my father had first worked and where I had a summer job, closed its operations, and the buildings were demolished.

The neglected Ohio Theater downtown was razed in 1985. Two blocks away, the State Theater, which had endured a period of neglect, escaped the wrecking ball, and was saved by being placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.

•

History describes many gateways that explorers pass through on their way out to the wider unknown world. Gateways mark the beginning of a quest to overcome doubts or achieve some greater understanding. For the Greeks, it was the Pillars of Hercules at the western end of the Mediterranean, for the Romans it was the Stone Tower somewhere in the Pamirs that was a portal to Asia and the routes of the Silk Road. For the Cowdery-Curtis families, it had been the Great Genesee Road leading them out of New England to find new lives in the Midwest. For me, the Ohio Turnpike Exit 7, smack in the middle of northern Ohio, was my gateway out of Sandusky. The Turnpike had been the long-term replacement to the Lake Shore Electric trains connecting Sandusky to a network of northern Ohio stations connecting Cleveland and Toledo. When I accepted my toll ticket and then had to face the metallic green and white lettered interstate signs with a choice of East to Cleveland or West toward Toledo, I read them as New York or Chicago. The highway would carry me to big cities with department stores, expensive restaurants, and museums. As a kid, I thought of them as important cities, because that’s where they had television stations. If there was an advantage to being in between it was that you could receive signals from Cleveland, Toledo, and sometimes Detroit.

Growing up, Exit 7 meant the start of an exciting journey—at least to Cleveland. Exit 7 was a break in the monotony of cornfields, ranch- style motels, and a factory that made asphalt shingles. If I had been a six-year-old designing highways and scenery with crayons and news- print, I would have added more Redwood trees, hairpin curves, tunnels, and purple mountains.

From Color Capital of the World: Growing Up with the Legacy of a Crayon Company.
Copyright © 2022 by John Kropf.
Reprinted with permission of the University of Akron Press.