Vintage 1940s Locomotive Engineer Crate Label 🚂 Thomas Mouradick, Fresno, CA, Steam Train Railroad

Who Was the Locomotive Engineer on This Label? 🚂 The Man On This Label Really Was a Locomotive Engineer

Size: 13" x 4"

Most crate labels show you the fruit. This one shows you the train — head on, smoke up, running out of the vineyards straight at you. And the name across the top isn't a bit of romantic branding somebody cooked up in an ad office. Thomas Mouradick drove locomotives for a living before he ever grew a grape. He named his brand after the job he left.

That is the whole thing right there, and it is one of my favorite stories on any label in the drawer.

👤 Erie Railroad, 1897

Mouradick came to America from Armenia — a refugee, in the years when a great many Armenians were leaving and not by choice. He caught on with the Erie Railroad in 1897, and he started where everybody started: firing coal trains, shovel in hand, on the runs between Cleveland and Randall, Ohio.

In 1902 he was promoted to engineer. Then he did something I did not expect at all — he went to South America and ran locomotives on a Peruvian railroad. A few years after that he turns up in Los Angeles, an engineer for the Santa Fe.

And then he quit. He took his savings out of railroading and put every dollar of it into fruit, at Fresno.

He prospered. He became one of the big growers and shippers in the valley — and here is the part I think is genuinely wonderful: he shipped his carloads east over the Erie. The same railroad he had fired and driven on as a young man was now hauling his grapes to market. He stayed a lifelong member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, and in 1924 he went back to Cleveland for the Brotherhood's convention and saw his old eastern railroad friends again — this time as a California fruit man.

So when you look at that locomotive coming at you, understand what you are looking at. That is not decoration. That is the man's own résumé, painted on the side of every box of grapes he sold.

Here is the thing that gets me. This label has been admired and collected for decades purely as advertising art — the composition, that engine bearing down on you out of the vineyards. And among the people who own one, hardly anybody knows the man really ran locomotives. The story very nearly went into the ground with him. That is exactly the kind of thing I hunt for, and exactly why I will not let a sheet like this go out with nothing but "grape label, Fresno" attached to it.

🔍 Everything Printed on It

• LOCOMOTIVE ENGINEER across the top in tall cream letters, with BRAND tucked in beside the boiler
• FRUIT SPECIAL lettered in a curve around the locomotive's smokebox door
• TRADE MARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF., small, upper left
• 30 YEARS GROWING QUALITY GRAPES AND OTHER FINE FRUITS IN CALIFORNIA, upper right
• CALIFORNIA in white, lower left of center
• THOMAS MOURADICK · MAIN OFFICE · GROWER AND SHIPPER · FRESNO, CALIF. in orange-red and black, lower right
• The printer's foot line in microtype along the bottom edge: CROCKER-UNION S. F. 6

The picture is a heavy steam locomotive pulling a long string of refrigerator cars down out of the hills through vineyard country. The blank panel at the bottom is not damage and not a printing fault: that is where the packing shed inked the lot, the variety or the grade on the day the box was filled. This one never got stamped.

🚆 What a Fruit Special Actually Was

Look at the color of those cars. They are painted a hot orange-yellow, and that is not the artist being cheerful — that was the real livery of Pacific Fruit Express, and PFE is who moved California fruit.

PFE was founded in 1906 by E. H. Harriman as a joint venture of the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific, and it began running in 1907 with 6,600 refrigerator cars. At its peak it owned 40,000 reefers, twenty ice plants and five maintenance shops — the largest refrigerator car operator in the world. Fresno is Southern Pacific country. Mouradick's grapes went out in those cars.

A "fruit special" was a train made up entirely of loaded reefers, and the reason the phrase was worth printing on a label is that those trains were given right of way over other traffic. Fruit outranked freight. On a hot week in the San Joaquin Valley, grapes in a wooden box have a limited number of days in them, and a solid block of iced cars running under priority orders was the difference between selling in Chicago and dumping the load.

So a Fresno shipper who lettered FRUIT SPECIAL onto the nose of his locomotive was telling a buyer two thousand miles away one thing: this gets there. Coming from a man who had actually sat in the right-hand seat, I would say he had earned the right to make the promise.

🍇 Fresno, and the Growers Who Built It

Mouradick was not an outlier. Fresno County was the raisin and table-grape capital of the country, and an extraordinary share of it was built by Armenian immigrant growers who arrived from the 1880s onward — people who had been viticulturists for generations back home and found the San Joaquin Valley's heat and light close enough to what they knew that they went straight back to work.

By 1930, Armenian families owned roughly 40 percent of the county's raisin acreage and made up about a quarter of its growers, and they were the valley's leading dried-fruit packers and green-fruit shippers. A great many of the names you will find on Fresno crate labels come out of that community. Mouradick took the long way around — Ohio, Peru, Los Angeles — but he ended up exactly where his countrymen were.

🏠 The Family Kept the Name

The story does not stop with him, and the labels prove it. A second Mouradick — Cy S. Mouradick of Fresno — shipped under the F.O.B. brand, "freight on board", on a strip label the same 13 × 4 shape as this one, and that one has a train speeding across it too. The family had a house style.

The packing house itself became the Locomotive Packing Company of Fresno — they kept the engine right in the company name — and shipped under the Tommy Boy brand. Later the family ran M&A Distributing, Inc., a grape processing and cold-storage operation down in Coachella, and stayed in table grapes until M&A was sold in the mid-1990s.

Erie fireman in 1897, to a California grape house that sold in the nineties. Three generations, and the locomotive stayed on the letterhead the whole way.

🖨️ Crocker-Union, San Francisco — and How That Dates It

The foot line reads CROCKER-UNION S. F. 6, and that little scrap of microtype is the most useful thing on the sheet, because it pins down when.

H. S. Crocker began in Sacramento in 1856. Union Lithograph was established in San Francisco in 1888 — it started life as J. C. Hall & Company. Crocker acquired the firm in 1922, and the combined business traded under the name Crocker-Union only from 1936 to 1946.

Ten years. That imprint cannot have been printed outside that window. Now put the 30 YEARS claim beside it — Mouradick was already an established grower shipping carloads east by 1924, so he went into fruit somewhere around the early-to-mid 1910s, and thirty years on from there lands you in the early-to-mid 1940s. The family's F.O.B. label is dated to the 1940s as well. That is where this one sits.

Worth looking at closely, too: the smoke, the haze on the hills, the bloom on the black grapes. All of it is flat stone-printed color laid over itself — no screens, no photography.

✅ Condition

New old stock. Never pasted to a crate, never trimmed, no glue on the back — turn one over and it is clean cream paper with just a ghost of the front showing through. Strong color, clean edges.

These came out of packing-house stock that never got used up, which is the only reason a throwaway piece of paper like this survived at all. The ones that did their job went east on a boxcar and ended up in a bin behind a grocer's.

❓ Questions People Ask

How old is it?

1940s. There is no printed date anywhere on the sheet — the dating comes from the Crocker-Union foot line, which brackets it to 1936–1946, and from the thirty-years claim.

What fruit is it for?

Grapes. Three bunches are pictured and the slogan says grapes outright, though no variety is named.

What is the blank teal panel for?

The packing shed stamped it — lot, grade or variety — when the box was filled. An unstamped one is a label that never went to work.

Was it ever used?

No. Unused, unmounted, no glue.

Is the railroad connection real?

It is. Thomas Mouradick fired and drove for the Erie, ran a railroad in Peru, drove for the Santa Fe, then left railroading for Fresno fruit — and shipped back east over the Erie. The brand is named for his old trade.