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Fruit on the brain

Last fall I picked up a new hobby. It's the sort of hobby I associate with retirees, or maybe nostalgia freaks, of which I am neither. I collect vintage crate labels.

Back in the old days, fruit and vegetables were shipped in wooden crates with colorful, lithographed paper labels slapped on the ends. The unused labels are like mini posters of a past era. Nowadays most produce comes in cardboard boxes with the information printed directly thereon. No fun at all.

I grew up in a Southern California town that was placed on the map by the citrus industry in the early 1900s. Now Claremont is better known as a college town, and the intermingling of those worlds can be seen in several college-themed orange and lemon crate labels from the 1920s through 1940s with names like Collegiate, Athlete, and Co-Ed. These labels feature idyllic portraits of the area as it was before there were freeways and smog and Hummers and shopping malls with ginormous parking lots. I got several Claremont labels from my mom, who bought them for $1 each in the 1970s. The prices are written in pencil on the backs of the labels.

Then I found a beautiful pear label with a painting of Mt. Lassen spewing steam after its 1915 eruption. Cool! We've hiked to the top of Mt. Lassen, which is just a few hours from San Francisco. We've seen the burbling mudpots and the emerald-green glacial lakes. I became hooked on looking for interesting labels.

While we were in Ohio a couple of weekends ago, we stopped by an art store inside the North Market to flip through a small selection of crate labels on display. Dave casually asked the proprietor if she had any more labels in the back. She reached down under the counter and pulled up a huge stack. They were $4 each. My eyes widened.

We sifted through Louisiana yams, Idaho apples and Florida oranges and then I came upon the find of the year. It was a Donner Pears label. Every year I go up to Donner Lake, near Tahoe, to race in the Donner Lake Triathlon. The label features a painting of Donner Lake as it is seen from high up Donner Pass Road, several miles into the bike course. I think I squealed right there in front of the cheesemonger and the Amish man selling beeswax products.

We ended up buying seven labels there. They are hanging in our living room (I spent more on the cheapo Cost Plus frames than on the labels themselves). Most people consider these things "kitchen art" but they are all over our apartment now.

What's fun is finding labels that I find exceptionally beautiful, or which depict an interesting piece of California history or a little corner of the world that I know intimately. (While the Athlete label above is for a Claremont packing company, it depicts the Los Angeles Coliseum, which had just been completed in 1923 and hosted the 1932 Olympics.) And many of them have an Arts and Crafts-era aesthetic that I find very appealing. What's even more fun is finding them for a couple bucks each. Some of these labels sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Ooh -- I just found a Mt. Shasta Pears label on ebay for $7 -- I can hang it next to the Lassen label. When we drove up CA 99 last June on our way to Idaho, we could see the snow-capped peaks of both mountains in the distance on either side of the highway. It was just beautiful.

March 28, 2006 2:30 PM