Vintage 1940s William Tell Cherries Crate Label 🍒 San Joaquin Valley CA NOS

🍒 Do You Remember the Legend That Sold California Cherries?

Size: 10" x 2 1/2" ~ little to no wear.

Somebody in the produce business needed a name that would sell a box of cherries to a buyer who'd look at it for about one second, and they picked the most famous shot in European legend. William Tell kneels with his crossbow drawn, his boy stands against the trees downrange, and something small and red sits on the boy's head. In the story it's an apple. On a cherry label, I'll let you make your own guess. Every one I have is unused, never pasted to a box.

🏷️ What it says

William Tell BRAND CHERRIES, and in the shipper's panel: ANTHONY A. BIANCO, INC., Main Office: NEW YORK, N.Y., From SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, PRODUCE OF U.S.A. That pairing is the whole story of the firm in two lines - the fruit grew in California, and the office that sold it sat in New York. There's no printer's name, no year and no ZIP code anywhere on it, so I date it by the firm: a crate-label dealer who's handled this same brand, fruit and shipper puts it in the 1940s, and a New York main office selling San Joaquin Valley fruit fits those years.

🛒 From a pushcart to the Juice Grape King

Anthony A. Bianco came over from Italy in the 1920s as an 18-year-old and started out the way a lot of fruit men did, selling produce off a pushcart in the streets of New York City. The pushcart became a truck, and the truck became a permanent slot on the New York Produce Market, where he worked as a commission merchant for wine grapes, selling them through the New York produce auction. Those were the boxcars of California grapes that home winemakers back East waited on every fall.

In 1942, with his two oldest boys in the service, he decided it was a good time to move, and he took his wife and eight children out to Fresno to be closer to the grapes and tree fruit he'd been selling from the other side of the country. He kept right on selling through his New York office, which is exactly the setup this label prints. In 1950 he formed Bi-Mor Farms and the Bianco Fruit Corporation with partners, and by 1958, the way his family tells it, The New Yorker had named him the Juice Grape King of the United States. Grapes made his name, but here he is putting it on San Joaquin Valley cherries too.

Anthony Bianco died in 1967, and his sons carried on. Two of them, Domenick "Cookie" Bianco and his brother Bobby, founded Anthony Vineyards in 1972, and it's still growing California grapes.

🏹 The legend on the box

The story goes like this: in 1307 a Habsburg bailiff named Gessler hung his hat on a pole in the square at Altdorf and ordered everyone to bow to it. Tell wouldn't, so Gessler made him shoot an apple off his son Walter's head with a crossbow. He split it with the first bolt - and when Gessler asked what the second bolt in his quiver was for, Tell told him it was meant for him if he'd missed. That's the version Aegidius Tschudi wrote down around 1570, even pinning it to the 18th of November, 1307. The first written mention of Tell is older, in the White Book of Sarnen from about 1474.

Is any of it true? Nobody has ever found a scrap of 14th-century evidence that Tell lived, let alone that he made the shot. It didn't matter. Schiller put him on the stage at Weimar in 1804, Rossini turned him into an opera in 1829, and the finale of Rossini's overture went on to become the Lone Ranger's theme on radio, TV and film. By the time a fruit man went looking for a brand, everybody in America already knew William Tell, whether they'd read Schiller or just heard the hoofbeats come on after supper.

🍒 About these

They're 10 by 2 1/2 inches, a long narrow strip for the end of a cherry box. Frame one long and low over a kitchen doorway or a home bar, put it with your other San Joaquin Valley labels, or give it to anybody whose people worked the Fresno grape and fruit trade. The supply is finite - nobody's packing cherries under the Bianco name again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.