This beloved show is back with more tales from James Herriot and the delightful Yorkshire Dales. Stream all four seasons – only with OPB Passport!
A Sno-Kist fruit crate label, shown here in a provided photo, from before 1918. The labels were used to advertise the iconic fruits of the Northwest before the advent of cardboard boxes. Hobby Lobby Wooden Box
Before the advent of cardboard boxes, wooden crates were used to pack apples, pears and other iconic fruits of the Northwest to ship across the region and the nation. Up until the 1950s, the crates were adorned with elaborately illustrated labels bearing the name of the orchard that grew the fruit packed inside. These fruit crate labels reflect the histories of the growers, distributors, printers and artists involved with them from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. As such, they’re coveted by collectors across the Northwest and country, as the Capital Press recently reported.
Carlos Pelley is an archivist for the Yakima Valley Libraries. Mike Doty is a volunteer curator at the Yakima Valley Museum and a longtime fruit crate label collector. Thomas Hull is also a collector, and a history teacher at Davis High School in Yakima. They join us to talk about the history of the labels, which have fostered a community of collectors in the Pacific Northwest.
A particularly rare apple crate label, shown here in a provided digital image. The label was made for Denny Fruit as early as 1908 and manufactured by Stecher-Traung Litho Co.
Yakima Valley Libraries, Click Relander Collection, https://archives.yvl.org/items/a97a9b88-05fc-44b7-b98d-b85d21347ec5
Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Before Northwest fruit growers switched to cardboard boxes in the 1950s, they packed their apples and pears and other fruit into wooden crates for shipment across the nation. The crates were adorned with elaborately illustrated labels. As the Capital Press recently reported, these labels are now coveted by collectors in the Northwest and across the country because these advertisements aren’t just beautiful. They are pieces of history. Carlos Pelley is an archivist for the Yakima Valley Libraries. Mike Doty is a volunteer curator at the Yakima Valley Museum and a longtime fruit crate label collector. Thomas Hull is a collector as well. He’s also a history teacher at A.C. Davis High School in Yakima. They all join us now. Welcome to the show.
Carlos Pelley: Thank you for having me.
Miller: Carlos first. When did fruit crate labels become advertising tools?
Pelley: Fruit label advertising tools throughout the West Coast originated in the 19th century, specifically in I would say, around the late 1800s is when you first start seeing fruit labels appear in the Yakima area in central Washington.
Miller: Who was the intended audience for these labels?
Pelley: Interestingly enough, these labels were actually designed not for, for example, folks going to the grocery store. These were actually designed for buyers, commercial buyers, who were interested in filling markets at these different, various grocers. So it was a tool to actually advertise to a professional commercial market.
Miller: If that’s the market, if those are your customers, the large-scale buyers, what kind of messages did orchard owners want to communicate?
Pelley: They definitely were interested in a variety of different ways to kind of grab the eye of these large-scale buyers. Some of the things that they would really try to introduce were of course different themes that prevailed during the day, but it was almost always the freshness and quality of the products that they were delivering. So, you would see very well illustrated pictures of fruits and very bright, vibrant colors. It was a way to kind of associate that freshness with the fruit, and they wanted to communicate that very quickly.
Miller: Mike Doty, what kinds of memories of fruit labels do you have from when you were growing up? How present were they in your life?
Mike Doty: Growing up, they weren’t. I got into the industry when I was 23, and that was the first time I’d seen a label.
Miller: Huh. And before that they were just, it wasn’t even like people would have them for nostalgic reasons in their kitchens?
Doty: I wasn’t aware of it.
Miller: How did you get involved then as a collector?
Doty: Well, it happened by accident. An apple salesman in Wenatchee asked me if I could ask a warehouse in Yakima if he could get one of their labels because his cousin had the same last name, and he was wanting to make him a clock for Christmas. So, I go into the warehouse and ask the manager, and he takes me down in their basement to a couple of file cabinets and says, ‘Take whatever you want.’ So I grabbed the one for the guy in Wenatchee, and I took about 50 for myself of different ones because I thought they were neat looking. Then I took them home… My father was in the industry, and he used to even paste them on boxes when he was a kid, first in a warehouse. So I laid all 50 of them out on the floor. We looked at them, and he called a buddy of his, who was a collector. This was in 1980. We went to his house and he gave me another 50, plus some traders. Then I started, when I was going to the warehouses, I asked them if they had any, and some of those warehouses gave me labels and maybe a few extras. And it just snowballed.
Miller: Huh. When you were going to all these warehouses, why was that?
Doty: I started out being a produce inspector for a co-op of chain stores.
Miller: Oh okay. So you had a reason to be there for your job, but then you also, that reason gave you access to these places. And at that time, in the early ‘80s, these old labels were just sort of forgotten in file cabinets and basements?
Doty: Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Vaults, some of them were in vaults I remember. Some of them were up in attics, out of the way. The ones that weren’t burned or taken to the landfills did survive.
Miller: Thomas Hull, Mike Doty has been collecting labels since 1980 – 43 years ago – longer, as I understand it, than you have been alive. You’re 32?
Thomas Hull: Yes, sir. That’s correct.
Miller: How did you get interested in collecting labels?
Hull: Thank you for that question. My family was in the food industry for five generations. By the time I came along, we had actually exited the food industry and entered the golf industry. We turned our orchards into a golf course. But the story of sort of like our family’s connection had remained vibrant. One year, for my birthday, my grandmother gifted me a copy of the fruit label that my family packed under. She said, ‘Just a copy here. Our original label is really hard to find, but I want you to have a copy of it.’ And I cherished it as a kid, thought it was fun. Then as a young adult, people saw me become interested in history. I had some acquaintances and family members sort of casually gift me labels because, as I’m sure Carlos and Mike will both attest, they’re beautiful images. They make great gifts oftentimes. So people gave me labels as a casual gift, and then that sort of piqued my interest and drew me to go seek out an original copy of my family’s label. I’ve been on that hunt ever since.
Miller: Oh, so you don’t have your own, an original copy of your family’s label in your collection?
Hull: Not in my personal collection. Not yet.
Hull: I know of them to exist in other collections. I know of some other large collectors that I’m close with that have them, but I’m still looking for an original for my collection.
Miller: What does it look like?
Hull: By most collectors’ perspective, it’s kind of an ugly label. It’s a simple black backgrounded label with two red apples on it and a gold diamond-shaped H. It’s not, again, in comparison to many of the other label specimens that are out there, it’s not particularly beautiful. But, in the collecting community, labels are classified both based upon image and also based upon respective rarity. Even though my family’s label is not particularly beautiful, it is particularly rare. So the hunt continues.
Miller: Mike, what are you on the hunt for right now?
Doty: Well, I happen to have one of those diamond-H labels. [Dave laughs] But I shellacked it to a crate that I went through a crate pile back in, I think 1981. I’m looking for whatever…
Miller: Wait, if I could just interrupt there. So, you shellacked it to a crate. Does that make it less interesting for other collectors?
Doty: But it’s the only one I have.
Miller: So what are you interested in collecting yourself right now, Mike?
Doty: Everything I don’t have.
Miller: [Laughing] But you have, what, 15… How many do you have right now?
Miller: 4,000! Okay, and there’s still many more that you don’t have – individual ones.
Doty: Oh yeah. I’m sure there’s another 4,000 or 5,000 out there I don’t have.
Miller: Hmm. Carlos, are there different eras in fruit crate labels over the decades? I mean, different big pieces of history where you can actually see the art or the themes changing?
Pelley: Yes, actually. There are classifications that are about, I think, three different eras that come to mind. They range corresponding to their years. The first one was called the Naturalistic era, and that was from 1885 to the Roaring Twenties, 1920. That was characterized by children, scenes of farming, Native Americans, cowboys… things that are associated with nature. Then the next era was directly after, and it’s the Advertising era. This is when we start getting into… it’s right after World War I, so you have things that are more bombastic – things like Hollywood, Broadway. Electrification by this point in time is more of a mainstay, more and more common, so you see things revolving around radio and things like that and luxuries. Then the last one that I was mentioning was the Commercial Art era, and that is from 1935 to about ‘55. This is when people are going through the Great Depression, so the value of fresh fruit is very, very prevalent. And this is when you start seeing the beginning of those geometric designs on labels. [That] becomes more prevalent. But more or less, things that we wouldn’t necessarily always associate with fruit, so you would also see things like aristocratic life, science fiction, technological conveniences. All those things would be in that Commercial Art era.
Miller: Thomas, how do you reckon with racial or gender stereotypes that sometimes crop up in these labels?
Hull: I like that question. That’s a question that I pose to my students oftentimes when I’m using labels in the classroom because a label is a primary source. It’s a window for us into the events of the past. It’s also a window for us into the beliefs and the perceptions that people had in the past. So when we look at the way that individuals and individuals of certain races or ethnicities and individuals of certain genders are portrayed on labels, I challenge students to look at that label and say, ‘Okay, why are we choosing a picture of a beautiful, robust, blonde woman – smiling blonde woman – to sell this fruit?’ or ‘Why are we choosing a picture of young children that are smiling and happy and look very physically healthy to sell fruit?’ And I oftentimes tell students, ‘If you walk away from looking at these labels, these primary sources, with more questions about them than you have answers, then you have accomplished what we want you to do with a primary source in history.’ But really for me, they show us how people viewed themselves at the turn of the century… again, as Carlos was saying here, from about the late 1880s through the mid to late 1950s. How are we as Americans or as Canadians – there’s a lot of fruit labels that come out of Canada as well – how were we viewing ourselves? And then how were we viewing others? What about the portrayals? There’s many labels amongst the pear and apple crate label body of material, many labels portray Native Americans on them. What is the portrayal of the Native American population? How were they portrayed by the non-native American population? The lithography companies and the artists that are working for those companies, many of them are not Native. So what do they perceive Native American culture to be? It’s oftentimes very flat and very dismissive. We buy into the stereotypes that, if you’re familiar with Frederick Jackson Turner and the belief of the American West and the expansiveness of the West, how do we buy into this belief of… I hate to say it, but the noble savage is how Turner views the Native American population. Many labels also portray that image.
Miller: Thomas Hull, Mike Doty and Carlos Pelley. Thanks very much.
Pelley: Thank you for having me.
Hull: Thanks for having us.
Miller: Thomas Hull is a fruit crate label collector, a teacher at A.C. Davis High School in Yakima. Mike Doty is a volunteer curator at the Yakima Valley Museum, a label collector himself. And Carlos Pelley is an archivist for the Yakima Valley Libraries.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.
Unfinished Wood Crates Tags: Think Out Loud, History