Vintage 1940s Pride of Venice Cove Orange Crate Label 🍊 — Klink Citrus Association, Ivanhoe, Tulare County CA

Who Packed Pride of Venice Cove Oranges? 🐓 PRIDE OF VENICE COVE, Klink Citrus Association, Ivanhoe, Tulare County, California

Size: 11" x 10" ~ Little to no wear.

This rooster is crowing his head off, and he's earned it, standing tall over two ripe oranges and a spray of orange blossom. PRIDE OF VENICE COVE runs across the top, and below it the packer is named as the Klink Citrus Association of Ivanhoe, in Tulare County, California.

Down at the rooster's feet sits a red and cream emblem reading CALIFORNIA Red Ball, with REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. in tiny type beneath it. The back is blank, with the lettering and the rooster showing through in reverse.

🔴 What "Red Ball" Meant

That emblem is a grade mark. The California Fruit Growers Exchange, the Sunkist people, sorted fruit by quality, and California Red Ball was its middle grade: satisfying juice and sugar, and less than 2 percent decay allowed. The label historian Austin McClelland calls it the grade that got abused the most, since a packer could slip lower fruit into a Red Ball box. So when you see Red Ball on a label, you're looking at good, honest everyday oranges, one step below the Sunkist best.

🏫 Ivanhoe and the Venice Hills

Ivanhoe is a little citrus town near the Sierra Nevada foothills in Tulare County, and it has a name story. Local history says the Southern Pacific gave its siding here the name Klink back in 1888, honoring George Klink, who audited for the railroad, and that's the name the citrus association carried. The town itself, the story goes, was first called Venice Hill, and it took the name Ivanhoe from its school, named after Sir Walter Scott's novel. Two miles to the southeast rise the Venice Hills, a little range of foothills topping out at 604 feet and named for all the streams running through them. The old Venice School on their southern end was built in 1898 and is still the oldest school in use in Tulare County. It joined the Ivanhoe School District in 1957.

The Klink Citrus Association goes back to 1917, when citrus was booming in Tulare County, and trademark records show it filing its EXCLUSIVE and IVANHOE marks in July 1925 and the Pride of Venice Cove name in November 1982. The UCLA Library lists Pride of Venice Cove in its California fruit label collection.

🖼️ A Piece of California

Crate labels like this were a common sight once, and today they're treasured relics of a bygone era. They were printed by lithography, a stone or metal plate carrying the design, and the skill and careful attention to detail behind that craft is a big part of the appeal; nothing since has quite matched it. Demand has been climbing, and some museums and art institutes have set aside galleries for these labels, which says a lot about how seriously they're taken as art and as collectibles. If you collect, I think you'll want one on your shelf.

Picture this vintage advertising hanging in your home. Out of the museum and onto your own wall, it brings a touch of nostalgia and real elegance to any room and lifts the whole feel of the space.