Vintage 1960s-70s Desert Rat Crate Label 🌵 Prospector & Burro, Joe Phillips Inc, Queen Creek AZ & Fresno CA

Who Was the Desert Rat? 🌵 Vintage 1960s-70s Crate Label, Joe Phillips Inc., Queen Creek AZ and Fresno CA

Size: 13" x 4" ~ little to no wear.

🌵 Desert Rat: A Prospector, His Burro and a Packing House That Is Gone

A desert rat is a wandering prospector, and this one looks like he has walked every wash between Fresno and the Superstition Mountains: white beard, sharp blue eyes, a slouch hat, a corn-cob pipe clamped in his teeth and a gray burro leaning over his shoulder. Behind him saguaro and prickly pear run out to violet mountains under a sky that fades from turquoise to yellow. The label names Joe Phillips, Inc. of Fresno as its packer, and a second place too — Queen Creek, Arizona, a farm town that counted 1,378 people in 1980 and has since grown to nearly sixty thousand. Joe Phillips, Inc. is gone now, RIP 1996. This is the label it left behind.

🔍 What the Label Prints

A 13" x 4" paper produce label, new old stock, never used. From end to end:

• DESERT at the left and RAT at the right, in heavy italic block capitals shaded from yellow to orange
• The prospector at the center — white hair and beard, blue eyes, gray-green slouch hat, corn-cob pipe, olive coat over a red shirt — with a gray burro behind his shoulder
• A desert floor of saguaro, prickly pear, yucca and palms before a line of violet mountains
• PRODUCE OF U.S.A. at lower left
• A round blue seal: PACKERS & SHIPPERS around the top, JOE PHILLIPS, INC. on a banner across it, FRESNO, CALIF. around the bottom
• QUEEN CREEK, AZ 85242 and FRESNO, CA 93711
• A maroon base band reading PACKED FOR AND DISTRIBUTED BY JOE PHILLIPS, INC. between two green stars
• The printer's imprint in tiny type on the green strip at lower left: STECHER-TRAUNG-SCHMIDT S.F. CALIF.

No fruit is named or pictured anywhere on it — the prospector does all the selling. The two address lines went on last, overprinted in plain black type onto the finished label, and that is how the Center for Sacramento History describes the copy of this same Desert Rat label it keeps in its collection. The back is blank, with the front lettering showing through in reverse. And those five-digit ZIP codes put the printing after July 1, 1963, the day ZIP codes were introduced nationwide.

⛏️ What a Desert Rat Was, and the Mine That Named Queen Creek

"Desert rat" was the name for a wandering prospector, and the country around Queen Creek was prospector country. The creek the town is named for was first called Picket Post Creek; it was renamed for the Silver Queen Mine. That silver vein was staked on March 29, 1875. The Silver Queen Mining Company was organized in 1880 and shut down in 1893 when the silver gave out. In 1910 William Boyce Thompson and George Gunn bought the old Silver Queen and organized the Magma Copper Company, and the mining town nearby, once called Queen, is Superior, Arizona today.

👻 The Legend in the Mountains: The Lost Dutchman

Northeast of Queen Creek, beyond Apache Junction and east of Phoenix, rise the Superstition Mountains, and they hold Arizona's great prospector legend. The story goes that Jacob Waltz, a German immigrant who came to Arizona in the 1860s, found a rich vein of gold or a hidden cache somewhere in those mountains and never told anyone where. Waltz died on October 25, 1891, nursed at the end by Julia Thomas, and the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine grew with every retelling. A tale of a Peralta family working a secret mine there was woven in later; the scholar Robert Blair called it "a contrivance of 20th century writers."

Then, in the summer of 1931, a 66-year-old treasure hunter named Adolph Ruth went into the Superstitions looking for the mine and did not come back. His skull was found months later with two bullet holes in it, the story made national news, and the legend has pulled searchers into those mountains ever since — more than twenty of them have died or vanished there. The mine has never been found.

🌾 Queen Creek, Arizona: From Rittenhouse to Suburb

Queen Creek was first called Rittenhouse, after C. H. Rittenhouse, who formed the Queen Creek Farms Company in 1919 and set up a railroad stop to ship produce. For most of its history it stayed a farming community; the town did not incorporate until September 5, 1989, and the 1980 census found only 1,378 residents. Local cotton was picked by hand until a cotton gin came to Queen Creek in the 1920s, and the town's historic water tower was built in 1952 for the Producers Cotton Gin. The growth of Phoenix changed it completely: 26,361 people by 2010 and 59,519 by 2020. Queen Creek lies mostly in Maricopa County, with a piece in Pinal County.

🏭 Joe Phillips, Inc. and the Printer Behind the Label

What the label tells us about its company is all in that blue seal: Joe Phillips, Inc., packers and shippers, Fresno, California, with a second address in Queen Creek, Arizona. The company is gone — RIP 1996. California's Secretary of State suspended the corporation on August 15, 1996.

The seal says Fresno, but Joe Phillips was a grower-shipper from Bakersfield, which is how the trade papers described him back in 1952. In 1964 Joe Phillips, Inc. still had its headquarters in Bakersfield and ran its Fresno operation from June 15 to November 15, with its own cold storage and consolidation facilities there. Their ads in the produce trade yearbooks of the '70s and early '80s show a company specializing in Kern County potatoes, onions, lettuce, tomatoes, grapes, juice grapes, deciduous fruit and mixed vegetables, and by 1982 they were billing themselves as mixed load specialists. A 1981 handler directory has them moving tree fruit, vegetables, grapes and citrus. By the early '80s the fruit side was running out of an office on West Shaw Avenue in Fresno, and Desert Rat was one of the brands in their trade ads, right alongside Yellow Pages, Lugano and Spinelli. The state's corporate record for Joe Phillips, Incorporated gives that same West Shaw address, with the 93711 ZIP code that's printed on this label.

And the Desert Rat name is older than the sheet it's printed on. When Joe Phillips, Inc. of Fresno filed for the DESERT RAT trademark in August 1978, it was for table grapes, plums and wine grapes, and they gave the first use as August 1958. The registration was granted on July 3, 1979. So that name had been going out on Joe Phillips fruit for twenty years before they filed for it. Their labels rode on wooden lugs, too: a 1980 USDA case describes wooden lugs of grapes marked "Yellow Pages, Distributed by Joe Phillips Inc." and stamped "Ruby Cabernet."

The printer's name carries a longer San Francisco story. Schmidt began in 1872, when a German immigrant named Max Schmidt, just let go by Korbel Bros., the cigar-box and label makers, put ten dollars of his savings into the rent on a ten-by-twelve room and hung out a sign reading M. Schmidt & Co. The business was incorporated as the Schmidt Label & Lithographic Company in 1883 and reopened as the Schmidt Lithograph Company after the 1906 earthquake. Stecher, a Rochester, New York house that opened in 1887, was acquired in 1936 by the Traung Lithographic Company of San Francisco to form Stecher-Traung. In 1966 Schmidt Lithograph merged with Stecher-Traung to become the Stecher-Traung-Schmidt Corporation — two of the West's big label houses under one name — and that three-part name in the tiny imprint means this label went to press in 1966 or later.

🌵 About these

The supply is finite - Joe Phillips' packing house is gone and nobody's printing Desert Rat labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.