If you dye eggs every Easter, you're probably a PAAS customer. So were your parents and their parents, and unless an unlikely challenger with a revolutionary new egg dye materializes, PAAS will probably continue to dominate the Easter egg dye market for generations to come.
Like so many legendary products, PAAS started with a mishap. A Newark pharmacist named William Townley accidentally stained his suit while measuring out powdered dye for a customer, an incident that irritated him so much that he devised a way to compress the powder into dissolvable tablets. Packets of Townley's Easter Egg Dye contained five colors of easy-to-use tablets and sold like hotcakes at a cool nickel apiece.
Townley smelled an opportunity and pounced. He gave his business a new name: the PAAS Dye company, cribbed from "Passen," the Pennsylvania Dutch word for Easter.
PAAS kits have changed somewhat over the years — stickers, perforated holes to hold freshly dyed eggs, wire holders to lower the eggs into the dye — but the signature dye tablets and their commercial appeal haven't changed. Families dyed eggs at Easter long before William Townley wrecked a perfectly good suit, but his handy little innovation ensured that PAAS would almost always be part of the celebration.
Rick Good spent ten years in the newspaper business, including with The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC). He co-wrote, with Melinda Coleman, Rutledge to Riley: Governors of South Carolina, 1776–Present (Published by The Greenville News), and is the author of Mind Games Trivia #1 (Amazon). He has recently spent 15 years creating original trivia content through Sounds Good Mobile Entertainment and continues that with his new company, SGME Software. He edits The Smart Reader’s money, real estate, and business coverage.
