Vintage 1950s Blue Hound Crate Label 🍇 Reedley, CA, Greyhound Dog Racing!

Who Packed Blue Hound Fruit in Reedley? 🐕 Blue Hound Crate Label, T. Apkarian & Sons, Reedley, California

Size: 13" x 4" ~ Unused.

Off to the races! This is a vintage 1950s Blue Hound crate label from T. Apkarian & Sons of Reedley, California. A lean, long-legged blue hound, built like a racing greyhound, stretches out at full speed across a red ground, chasing a brown rabbit that leaps out of a round window onto a farm, with green crop rows rolling up to white buildings with red roofs, purple hills and a blue sky with white clouds. BLUE HOUND runs across in big cream block letters outlined in brown.

My pictures seriously don't do it justice.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• PRODUCE OF U.S.A.
• BLUE HOUND
• GROWN AND PACKED BY T. APKARIAN & SONS, REEDLEY, CALIFORNIA
• © STECHER-TRAUNG S. F., CALIF. (the printer, in tiny type at the lower right)

Stecher-Traung of San Francisco printed it; that firm carried the Stecher-Traung name from 1936 until 1966. The label doesn't name the fruit, but the trademark does. The Patent Office Gazette of 1951 lists BLUE HOUND "For Fresh Grapes," with use claimed since August 1937, and the Fresno County Public Library's crate label collection files its Blue Hound labels under grapes too. That's why the yellow box on this one is blank: it was left for the grape variety, and another printing of the same design has EMPERORS in it. That little farm in the window, with its rows, is vineyard country.

So it can't be older than 1937. This printing has no ZIP code, and a later re-plate of the same design added Reedley's 93654, so mine most likely came off the press before ZIP codes arrived in 1963.

🍇 T. Apkarian & Sons and the Fruit Basket of the World

The Apkarians grew and packed fruit out of Reedley under a whole string of brands. The same Fresno County collection holds their Bear Mountain, Bear Mountain Cub, Buck Rock and Domingo labels alongside Blue Hound, and the Oklahoma Historical Society has a pair of their Bear Mountain produce boxes from August 1963, when the firm was already T. Apkarian & Sons Inc. Reedley itself sits in Fresno County, incorporated in 1913, and it calls itself "The World's Fruit Basket," which tells you what the land around it grows.

👨‍🌾 The T. in T. Apkarian

The T. was almost surely Tateos Apkarian. He was an Armenian farmer, born in 1888 in Harput, in what was then the Ottoman Empire, and he was in Reedley by 1916, buying property and farming with a wife and four children when he signed up for the World War I draft in 1917. He died in 1946, but the sons on the label kept right on going. In 1950 the firm of T. Apkarian & Sons was Vartan, Vahan, Asadoor and Nergiz Apkarian, and they went on to register Bear Mountain in 1957, Honey Belle melons in 1963 and Buck Rock grapes in 1964. Vartan was even breeding his own fruit: the 'Ama Lin' nectarine was patented in his name in 1984. There's still an Apkarian family farm in Reedley today, which I think is just great.

🏡 Display

Crate Labels are a reminder of a bygone era but the amazing lithography process 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 these out to preserve their history. Once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries then they will be very difficult to acquire.

Imagine this amazing vintage advertising hanging as home decor in any room of your home instead of a museum! The long shape fits right over a doorway, and it's a perfect gift for a greyhound lover, a dog racing fan, or anybody from Reedley and Fresno County.