Vintage 1960s Polar Bird Brand Penguin Crate Label 🐧 Royal Valley Fruit Growers Reedley California A. Carlisle Co.

Why Is There a Penguin on a Box of California Fruit? 🐧 A Vintage 1960s Polar Bird Brand Lug Label, Royal Valley Fruit Growers, Reedley

Size: 13" x 4"

A little penguin standing on the ice at one end, blue-and-cream icicles hanging down over a deep magenta sky, and POLAR BIRD stretched across the middle in big airbrushed letters that run from yellow to orange like a sunset on a snowbank. Underneath: BRAND, ROYAL VALLEY FRUIT GROWERS ASS'N., REEDLEY, CALIFORNIA, PRODUCE OF U.S.A., and the printer, A. CARLISLE & CO., in small blue type in the corner. It's a long, skinny lug label, made for the end of the shallow wooden boxes that carried plums, peaches and grapes out of the San Joaquin Valley - and these were never pasted on one.

Some labels are nice, and some make you stop and look twice. Our kids settled that one years ago - this is one of the best ones, and they'd wallpaper the house with it if we let them.

📅 How old is it? The trademark tells you

No year is printed on it, and a lot of people call this one a 1950s label. The paperwork says otherwise. Royal Valley Fruit Growers Association filed to register POLAR BIRD with the U.S. Patent Office on August 15, 1961, for fresh fruits, and swore that it first used the name on July 20, 1961. The registration, No. 733,898, came through on July 3, 1962, was renewed in 1982, and was finally cancelled in 2003. So a Polar Bird label belongs to 1961 or later - a 1960s label, not a 1950s one.

🍑 Royal Valley Fruit Growers Association

The association was new in 1951. That June the trade journal Ice and Refrigeration reported that the Royal Valley Fruit Growers Association had taken over the property and operations of the California Fruit Exchange in Reedley, and had contracted for a new cold storage plant that would use ice to cool the fruit. By October the plant was built - about 30 carloads of fruit packed in lug boxes - and had been used through the plum and peach season to precool fruit, with Emperor grapes to be stored over the winter; the magazine's photo named Walter Rice, the president, and Hiromi Shimizu, the secretary. By May 1952 a combination ice-cooled precooling and storage plant for about 27 carloads, built for around $40,000, was running.

The association was still at it in 1977, shipping nectarines out of Reedley - a sale that turned up in a USDA ruling the next year - and its address went from 1754 8th Street to Post Office Box 152. Polar Bird was one of its brands; dealers also list Red Wagon and Royal Mountain from the same association. Old-timers around the valley like to say the packing associations in Reedley competed hard after the war - the brand on a lug label was a point of pride, and growers had opinions about whose label looked best on the loading dock.

🌳 Reedley, The World's Fruit Basket

Reedley sits on the Kings River in Fresno County and still calls itself The World's Fruit Basket. It's named for Thomas Law Reed, a Union Civil War veteran who in 1888 gave half his holdings to the new township, land for the railroad depot included, and the railroad named the station after him. The town incorporated on February 18, 1913, and peaches, plums, nectarines and grapes have been the heart of it ever since; about 25,000 people live there today. The Chamber of Commerce says it started calling Reedley The World's Fruit Basket in November 1946 and later registered the phrase as a mark for the valley's best fresh fruit. That same year Art Tabler, the Santa Fe station agent, came up with the Reedley Fiesta to welcome the troops home and give thanks for a good harvest.

🖨️ A. Carlisle & Co.

The tiny printer's line belongs to A. Carlisle & Co. of San Francisco, which billed itself as printers, lithographers and stationers since 1852. Carlisle bought what was left of the old map and lithograph house of Britton & Rey in 1916, and in 1948 the trade press reported the death of its vice president and general manager, Owen Bronson, at 67. The name outlasted the crate-label business by decades: an A Carlisle & Co. of Nevada was still printing in 2025, when Reno Type bought it.

🐧 About these labels

Every one I have is unused, 13 by 4 inches, with a plain back where the penguin and the lettering just show through. It's a fun one framed long over a doorway or a kitchen window, in a penguin collection, or for anybody with family in Reedley or the Kings River country. And never mind that penguins live at the other end of the world from the North Pole - the icicles say cold, the penguin says cold, and that was the whole idea for a load of fruit headed east. The supply is finite - nobody prints lug labels like this anymore, and once these last unused ones are framed and hanging on walls, they'll be very difficult to acquire.