Vintage 1940s Levon Brand California Melons Crate Label 🦁 — L. M. Azhderian, Los Banos-Blythe California

Who Packed Levon Brand Melons? 🦁 Levon Brand California Melons, L. M. Azhderian

Size: 11 1/2" x 9" ~ Little to no wear.

A big tawny lion, crouched and snarling, stalking right off the label at you. This is a vintage 1940s Levon Brand California Melons crate label, packed and shipped by L. M. Azhderian of Los Banos-Blythe, California, and never used. And there's a reason it's a lion.

🔍 What's on it

LEVON in big cream slab letters with a red-and-black 3-D shadow, arched across the top, with a small BRAND under the last N and SELECTED QUALITY at the upper left. The lion is crouched low, mouth open, green-eyed, its front paws breaking across the line between a bright lime-green upper field and a dark lower band, its tail curling up into the green. Lower left, California in orange script over MELONS in heavy orange-red letters, then PRODUCE OF U.S.A. in light blue and PACKED & SHIPPED BY L. M. AZHDERIAN, LOS BANOS-BLYTHE, CALIFORNIA. There's a tiny printer's line in red down in the bottom right corner, and small as it is, it reads SCHMIDT L. CO. FRESNO. That's the Schmidt Lithograph Company, the big San Francisco label house that German-born printer Max Schmidt got going in the 1870s, and it printed labels for fruit crates, canned goods and Pacific Northwest salmon all over the West. The FRESNO on the end is their Fresno imprint, right in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley. Stecher-Traung bought Schmidt in 1966 and the firm became Stecher-Traung-Schmidt, so a label still carrying the plain Schmidt name was printed before that.

🇦🇲 Why a lion?

Levon is an Armenian name, the Armenian form of Leon, and Leon means lion. So Levon Brand is a lion brand, and the name tells you who was behind it. Azhderian is an Armenian family name too, and it runs deep in California melons: V.H. Azhderian started growing and shipping melons in the Imperial Valley in 1915, and V.H. Azhderian & Co. grew melons for more than a hundred years, in Holtville, Turlock, Dos Palos and at its old downtown packing house in Los Banos, under its Three Star label, until it left the melon business and its assets went to Martori Farms in 2025. L. M. Azhderian's Levon label comes out of that same melon country.

🌵 Los Banos and Blythe

The label pairs two melon towns that are a long way apart. Los Banos, in the western San Joaquin Valley, takes its name from the Spanish los baños, "the baths," after a spring that fed the natural wetlands there. Rancher Henry Miller built a vast gravity irrigation system in the 1870s that made the area rich, and the town was incorporated in 1907. Blythe is way down in the desert on the Colorado River, in the Palo Verde Valley. San Francisco financier Thomas Blythe filed on the river's water rights there in 1877, the town was named for him, and it was incorporated in 1916, the year the railroad came.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this vintage advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! That lion and lime green really jump off a kitchen wall, and it's a great gift for a Leo, a Levon, anybody with Armenian roots, or anybody from Los Banos or Blythe.

Crate labels are a reminder of a bygone era, and the lithography on them is unparalleled even to this day, in my opinion. Museums and art institutes have galleries dedicated to them, and more and more collectors are seeking them out to preserve their history. Once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries, they will be very difficult to acquire.