I absolutely loved them. Nothing made a nicer birthday gift than a new, clean coloring book and a fresh box of Crayola crayons.

I disliked sharing my colorbooks (as we called them) with other kids because few worked at it as meticulously as I did.

Early on, I observed various styles. Some kids colored everything the same color, many were careless about staying inside the lines, and some outlined each object with the chosen color first, then filled it in. This last looked neat, but in my opinion was not natural.

However, I had to let other kids use my books if I wanted to color in theirs. Too soon every page was filled, inevitably with many of them done carelessly by siblings or classmates. Often, courtesy of the baby in the family, a few pages were covered with scribbles.

The crayons always got broken somehow. One of my sisters liked to peel away their paper coverings, making them vulnerable to snapping when used, as well as gathering undesirable flecks of other unpeeled colors. I had to use my thumbnail to scratch the extra colors from yellow or pink before using them.

Every September, on the first day of our country school, we Jacobsen kids would walk proudly down the road, each with a new tablet, a couple of yellow pencils and the familiar gold and green box of Crayolas. Even now, when I think of making a fresh start at something, I remember the excitement of that yearly fresh start with our new school supplies. We were lucky enough to have the boxes of 16 crayons. Some of our schoolmates had to make do with smaller sets of six or eight.

We had other kinds of activity books in those days, too. One type had fields of dots on some parts of the picture. When we brushed water on these, a pastel color would appear.

I recall only blue-green, yellow and pink tints, and each page had but a single color that showed up. So they really were not as satisfactory as regular coloring books.

There were also "connect-the-dots" books, later called "dot-to-dot" by my own children. It was fun connecting the dots to make pictures, but our pencil lines were not perfect and the resulting pictures could not be so neatly colored.

Thinking about all this, I decided to look up our favorite crayons on the Internet and found an interesting history for them.

The Binney & Smith Co., founded in New York City in 1885, came out with Crayolas in 1903. Their first products were only colorants for commercial use and included red oxide pigment and carbon black for tires.

Always experimenting with new products, they produced the first dustless white chalk, which won a gold medal at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1902. A year later they introduced the first child-friendly crayons. Previous crayons were made from wax, dull in color and used mainly in industry.

Binney's wife Alice came up with the brand name Crayola, which meant "oily chalk."

When I read about the earlier wax crayons, I remembered the time or two I ran across off-brands that were waxy and pretty terrible. This was probably at someone else's house or maybe at Sunday school because we always used the beautiful Crayolas at home.

Through the years, Crayola packs have come in sizes from two crayons up to 800 for bulk boxes. The most common packages have been multiples of eight, including our 16-packs.

Colors contained in a package have ranged from two up to 200 (the largest include special effect crayons such as glitters and neons.)

The company continually tries out new colors, often with much fanfare in the news. Also, we read now and then about some colors they are retiring.

I don't believe anything will ever quite replace Crayola crayons. Colored felt-tip markers have taken a large share of the market in the past 20 or 30 years. But if they're used in the pulp-paper coloring books, the color bleeds through to the other side.

In my own life I've worked with colored chalk, colored pencils, watercolor and oil paints. They all have their own uses, but for children's coloring books the crayons are really about as perfect as you can get.

I'm pleased that in 1999 Crayola crayons became one of the first inductees in the National Toy Hall of Fame.

Ellen Campbell of Central City is active in the Central Nebraska Writers Network and writes this column bimonthly for Silver Salute. She can be reached by e-mail at campbell@cablene.com.