{"product_id":"vintage-1940s-locomotive-engineer-crate-label-fresno-ca-steam-train","title":"Vintage 1940s Locomotive Engineer Crate Label 🚂 Thomas Mouradick, Fresno, CA, Steam Train Railroad","description":"\u003ch2\u003eWho Was the Locomotive Engineer on This Label? 🚂 The Man On This Label Really Was a Locomotive Engineer\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSize:\u003c\/strong\u003e 13\" x 4\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv style=\"max-width:315px;margin:0 auto 20px;\"\u003e\u003cdiv style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:177.78%;height:0;overflow:hidden;\"\u003e\u003ciframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/iCreJAR0yF0\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer;autoplay;clipboard-write;encrypted-media;gyroscope;picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp\u003eMost crate labels show you the fruit. This one shows you the \u003cem\u003etrain\u003c\/em\u003e — 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. \u003cstrong\u003eThomas Mouradick drove locomotives for a living before he ever grew a grape.\u003c\/strong\u003e He named his brand after the job he left.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat is the whole thing right there, and it is one of my favorite stories on any label in the drawer.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e👤 Erie Railroad, 1897\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMouradick 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 \u003cstrong\u003eErie Railroad in 1897\u003c\/strong\u003e, and he started where everybody started: firing coal trains, shovel in hand, on the runs between \u003cstrong\u003eCleveland and Randall, Ohio\u003c\/strong\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn \u003cstrong\u003e1902 he was promoted to engineer\u003c\/strong\u003e. Then he did something I did not expect at all — he went to \u003cstrong\u003eSouth America and ran locomotives on a Peruvian railroad\u003c\/strong\u003e. A few years after that he turns up in \u003cstrong\u003eLos Angeles, an engineer for the Santa Fe\u003c\/strong\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd then he quit. He took his savings out of railroading and put every dollar of it into \u003cstrong\u003efruit, at Fresno\u003c\/strong\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHe prospered. He became one of the big growers and shippers in the valley — and here is the part I think is genuinely wonderful: \u003cstrong\u003ehe shipped his carloads east over the Erie.\u003c\/strong\u003e 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 \u003cstrong\u003eBrotherhood of Locomotive Engineers\u003c\/strong\u003e, and in \u003cstrong\u003e1924 he went back to Cleveland for the Brotherhood's convention\u003c\/strong\u003e and saw his old eastern railroad friends again — this time as a California fruit man.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🔍 Everything Printed on It\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eLOCOMOTIVE ENGINEER\u003c\/strong\u003e across the top in tall cream letters, with \u003cstrong\u003eBRAND\u003c\/strong\u003e tucked in beside the boiler\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eFRUIT SPECIAL\u003c\/strong\u003e lettered in a curve around the locomotive's smokebox door\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eTRADE MARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF.\u003c\/strong\u003e, small, upper left\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003e30 YEARS GROWING QUALITY GRAPES AND OTHER FINE FRUITS IN CALIFORNIA\u003c\/strong\u003e, upper right\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eCALIFORNIA\u003c\/strong\u003e in white, lower left of center\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eTHOMAS MOURADICK · MAIN OFFICE · GROWER AND SHIPPER · FRESNO, CALIF.\u003c\/strong\u003e in orange-red and black, lower right\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe printer's foot line in microtype along the bottom edge: \u003cstrong\u003eCROCKER-UNION S. F. 6\u003c\/strong\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🚆 What a Fruit Special Actually Was\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLook at the color of those cars. They are painted a hot orange-yellow, and that is not the artist being cheerful — \u003cstrong\u003ethat was the real livery of Pacific Fruit Express\u003c\/strong\u003e, and PFE is who moved California fruit.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePFE was founded in \u003cstrong\u003e1906 by E. H. Harriman\u003c\/strong\u003e as a joint venture of the \u003cstrong\u003eUnion Pacific and the Southern Pacific\u003c\/strong\u003e, and it began running in 1907 with \u003cstrong\u003e6,600 refrigerator cars\u003c\/strong\u003e. At its peak it owned \u003cstrong\u003e40,000 reefers, twenty ice plants and five maintenance shops\u003c\/strong\u003e — the largest refrigerator car operator in the world. Fresno is Southern Pacific country. Mouradick's grapes went out in those cars.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA \u003cstrong\u003e\"fruit special\"\u003c\/strong\u003e was a train made up \u003cem\u003eentirely\u003c\/em\u003e of loaded reefers, and the reason the phrase was worth printing on a label is that those trains were \u003cstrong\u003egiven right of way over other traffic\u003c\/strong\u003e. 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo a Fresno shipper who lettered FRUIT SPECIAL onto the nose of his locomotive was telling a buyer two thousand miles away one thing: \u003cem\u003ethis gets there.\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🍇 Fresno, and the Growers Who Built It\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMouradick 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 \u003cstrong\u003eArmenian immigrant growers\u003c\/strong\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy 1930, \u003cstrong\u003eArmenian families owned roughly 40 percent of the county's raisin acreage and made up about a quarter of its growers\u003c\/strong\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🏠 The Family Kept the Name\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe story does not stop with him, and the labels prove it. A second Mouradick — \u003cstrong\u003eCy S. Mouradick\u003c\/strong\u003e of Fresno — shipped under the \u003cstrong\u003eF.O.B. brand\u003c\/strong\u003e, \"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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe packing house itself became the \u003cstrong\u003eLocomotive Packing Company\u003c\/strong\u003e of Fresno — they kept the engine right in the company name — and shipped under the \u003cstrong\u003eTommy Boy\u003c\/strong\u003e brand. Later the family ran \u003cstrong\u003eM\u0026amp;A Distributing, Inc.\u003c\/strong\u003e, a grape processing and cold-storage operation down in Coachella, and stayed in table grapes until M\u0026amp;A was sold in the mid-1990s.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eErie 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🖨️ Crocker-Union, San Francisco — and How That Dates It\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe foot line reads \u003cstrong\u003eCROCKER-UNION S. F. 6\u003c\/strong\u003e, and that little scrap of microtype is the most useful thing on the sheet, because it pins down \u003cem\u003ewhen\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eH. S. Crocker began in \u003cstrong\u003eSacramento in 1856\u003c\/strong\u003e. Union Lithograph was established in \u003cstrong\u003eSan Francisco in 1888\u003c\/strong\u003e — it started life as J. C. Hall \u0026amp; Company. Crocker acquired the firm in \u003cstrong\u003e1922\u003c\/strong\u003e, and the combined business traded under the name \u003cstrong\u003eCrocker-Union only from 1936 to 1946\u003c\/strong\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTen years. That imprint cannot have been printed outside that window. Now put the \u003cstrong\u003e30 YEARS\u003c\/strong\u003e 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 \u003cstrong\u003eearly-to-mid 1940s\u003c\/strong\u003e. The family's F.O.B. label is dated to the 1940s as well. That is where this one sits.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWorth 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e✅ Condition\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNew 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e❓ Questions People Ask\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eHow old is it?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e1940s. 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eWhat fruit is it for?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGrapes. Three bunches are pictured and the slogan says grapes outright, though no variety is named.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eWhat is the blank teal panel for?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe packing shed stamped it — lot, grade or variety — when the box was filled. An unstamped one is a label that never went to work.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eWas it ever used?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNo. Unused, unmounted, no glue.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eIs the railroad connection real?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt 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. 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