Vintage Dominator Crate Labels Two Label NOS Set T.O. Tomasello Watsonville California 1940s 🍅

Size: 9" x 7" upright label, 13" x 5" horizontal label ~ new old stock, unused, never pasted to a crate. They vary a little one to the next.

A silver fighter plane dives out of a navy sky, flame bursting from the center of its propeller, and DOMINATOR climbs up to meet it in giant red block letters — right on a box of tomatoes. I've always had a soft spot for how unapologetically patriotic these wartime crate labels get, and this two-label Dominator Brand set doesn't hold back. Packed and shipped by T.O. Tomasello Co., Main Office, Watsonville, California, and the stars on that plane give the art away: every blue roundel still carries the red center dot that the U.S. military eliminated from its aircraft insignia in May 1942. These are 1940s new old stock labels, never pasted to a crate.

✈️ What the Two Labels Print

The horizontal tomato label

• PACKED & SHIPPED BY over a teal triangle, T.O.TOMASELLO CO. in yellow, and MAIN OFFICE WATSONVILLE CALIFORNIA beneath
• PRODUCE OF U.S.A. at the top right
• DOMINATOR in tall three-dimensional red and cream letters climbing to the right, with BRAND in orange
• TOMATOES in cream letters on a field that fades from navy to teal
• MINIMUM NET WT. 30 LBS. under the spinning propeller

The upright label

• PACKED AND SHIPPED BY / T.O.TOMASELLO CO. / MAIN OFFICE WATSONVILLE CALIF.
• DOMINATOR in red and yellow block letters with BRAND in orange
• PRODUCE OF U.S.A. in yellow at the lower right, over a navy field with a green glow
• It names no product and no weight

Both labels carry the same painting, redrawn for each shape: a silver single-engine fighter diving from the upper right with a framed cockpit canopy, a green speed trail behind the tail, red tracer streaks beneath the wings, a burst of flame at the propeller hub and a red line firing out of it. Blue roundels with a white star and a red center sit on both wings and the fuselage. Both backs are blank paper, with the front lettering showing through in reverse — the upright's back carries a faint blue-and-red streak down the center — and no printer's name appears on either label.

⭐ The Red Dot That Dates the Art

The star insignia is the clue. From 1919 the U.S. national aircraft insignia was a blue circle holding a white five-pointed star with a red disc at its center. From a distance that red center could be mistaken for the red Hinomaru roundel on Japanese aircraft, so in May 1942 it was eliminated, and aircraft already in service had the dot painted over in white.

The artist who painted the Dominator fighter painted the older star, red dot and all, which places the art in the first years of the 1940s, when patriotic themes had reached even the produce labels of California. The Ephemera Society of America, which collects and studies these prints, holds the Dominator label up as its own example of that wartime insignia showing up on produce art.

🛣️ Fire Through the Propeller

The label never names its plane, and the people who study these labels for a living call it a fictional aircraft — artist's license, not a real squadron machine. But the arrangement they gave it was no accident: a sleek silver single-seat fighter firing straight out of the center of its propeller, which was the calling card of Bell's P-39 Airacobra. The Airacobra was built around a 37 mm cannon that fired through the propeller hub, with its Allison engine mounted behind the pilot and car-style doors on the cockpit. It first flew on April 6, 1938, entered service in 1941, and 9,588 were built before production ended in August 1944. American pilots first met Japanese Zeros in Airacobras on April 30, 1942, near Lae, New Guinea.

🍅 T.O. Tomasello Co. of Watsonville

T.O. Tomasello Co. was a Watsonville family produce business, and Dominator was the brand it put on its tomatoes. The family stayed in the valley's produce trade for decades: Joseph Tomasello was born in Watsonville in 1935 to Antonio and Mary (Crosetti) Tomasello, came home after his military service to the family farming business, and ran it for the next 40 years. He served on the board of the Western Growers Association and was president of the Salinas Valley Grower-Shipper Association in 1972 and 1973.

🍎 Watsonville, the Apple City

Watsonville was laid out in 1852 by John H. Watson and D. S. Gregory and named for Watson, and it was incorporated around 1868 in Santa Cruz County. When the railroad was completed in 1871 the town became an agricultural hub, and Croatian immigrants began their rise to the top of the valley's apple industry. By 1908 the valley had 14,000 acres of apple trees, and Watsonville was known as the Apple City. Lettuce followed once refrigerated transport could carry it to distant markets, and today the valley is famous for strawberries.

Labels were part of that story from the start. P.N. Lettunich & Co. was the first Watsonville firm to put labels on its apple boxes, and by 1901 it was shipping 100,000 boxes and 110 train cars of fruit. In 1930 T.J. Horgan's packing house shipped more than 3,000 train car loads of produce, and by 1920 the valley had its own Airship Brand from Zupan & Lucich. The town still honors that trade: fifteen murals around downtown Watsonville reproduce the valley's old crate labels.

🏹 The Valley at War

The war reached the Pajaro Valley's fields directly. In 1942 the valley's Japanese residents were sent to internment camps for the rest of World War II, leaving farms nearly empty of workers, and the Bracero Program brought Mexican farm workers north from 1942 to 1964 to replace the workers the war had taken. That's the Watsonville these labels come from: a produce town whose fields the war changed, shipping under a fighter plane.

📦 Why Unused Labels Survive

Crate labels began on the West Coast in the 1880s, when California and Washington growers started shipping east over the new transcontinental rail routes. They were printed by stone lithography until about 1920 and by offset presses after that, at houses such as Schmidt Litho, Louis Roesch and Stecher-Traung. World War II strained the printers' resources and workforces and pushed shippers toward cheaper cardboard boxes with simple printed designs, and pre-printed corrugated boxes went on to replace the wooden crate and its glued label entirely. Many paper labels were destroyed. The ones that survive unused came from stock a packing house or printer never called on, and as the story goes, collectors started turning up forgotten bundles of them in farmhouses in the 1960s. I'm just glad a couple of these bundles kept the Dominator plane flying long enough for me to pass them on.