Vintage 1950s Snoboy Snowman Crate Label ❄️ Mountain Bartletts Pear Advertising Art, Los Angeles Calif

Whatever Happened to Snoboy, the Snowman Who Sold Pears? ❄️ Vintage Snoboy Mountain Bartletts Crate Label, Snoboy, Inc., Los Angeles

Size: 13" x 4"

Whatever happened to the little snowman who sold pears in the middle of a California summer? Here he is: a round white snowman with red earmuffs and red mittens with little white stripes at the cuffs, four black buttons down his front, waving one arm beside a tilted yellow card that says picked for flavor in red. Big yellow SNOBOY runs across the navy ground, with Mountain in teal script and BARTLETTS under it, and along the bottom, SNOBOY, INC., LOS ANGELES, CALIF., PRODUCE OF U.S.A. It's a long strip label, never pasted to a box, and every one I have is unused.

A snowman and a sign that said picked for flavor were doing real work: telling a buyer in a crowded wholesale market, from twenty feet away, that this crate was worth a second look. Old-timers in the produce trade used to say you could tell a shipment's quality by the label alone before you'd even cracked the lid, and a company that paid for a full-color snowman was making a statement about the fruit inside.

🍐 Where Snoboy came from

The brand started with a horse and cart. In 1890 George Youell was selling fruit off a cart in Tacoma, Washington; by 1910 the business was the Pacific Fruit and Produce Company, and in 1925, sold on Washington-grown apples, it began packing them under the Snoboy name. In 1930 Pacific Fruit & Produce merged with Gamble Robinson of Minneapolis - Ross and David Gamble and Harry Robinson's firm - to make Pacific Gamble Robinson, which the newspapers called the world's largest wholesaler of fresh fruits and vegetables.

The first snowman was a traditional one in a top hat. By the 1950s he'd turned into the round, babyish fellow in earmuffs you see here - the same snowman that went up in 1954 on the big sign over Pacific Gamble Robinson's Minneapolis distribution center at 7th Street and 5th Avenue North. That sign is still standing, decades after the company left the building.

🍐 The Bartlett

The pear on this label has a story of its own. It started around 1765 to 1770 in the garden of a schoolmaster named John Stair in Aldermaston, England, and a nurseryman named Williams made it famous over there. In 1799 trees came to Thomas Brewer's place in Roxbury, Massachusetts, the estate passed to Enoch Bartlett of Dorchester, and Bartlett, not knowing where the pears came from, named them after himself. Nobody figured out they were the same pear until 1828. By 1985 Bartletts were 80 percent of the pears grown in the country, and they're still the canning pear.

❄️ What became of him

Pacific Gamble Robinson was bought by a Washington food distributor in 1986, and the Minneapolis plant closed. In 1988 its produce-marketing arm became Amerifresh, which kept the Snoboy name and gave the snowman fancy new earmuffs. US Foods bought Snoboy in 2019, and the snowman is still on produce today under the line Field-Fresh Since 1925. This one names Snoboy, Inc. of Los Angeles alone; another Snoboy strip label lists offices in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Lakeland and La Feria, Texas. Which mountain orchards the Bartletts came from, the label doesn't say.

🍐 About these

They're long strip labels, unused, the backs blank. Frame one for a kitchen or a breakfast nook, where the navy and yellow pop on a light wall, or bring it out every winter - a snowman selling summer pears gets a laugh every year - and anybody who's driven through Minneapolis's North Loop will know him on sight. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Snoboy Mountain Bartletts labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.