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Preserving History: Authentic Objects Across Eras
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A batter uncoils into his swing, a baseball sails over the lettering, and a packed grandstand watches from under red, white and blue bunting. None of it has anything to do with cabbage, and all of it was meant to sell cabbage. This is a Safe Hit brand crate label for Texas Vegetables, packed and shipped by Gulf Distributing Co. of Weslaco, Texas: a 1950s color lithograph printed to be pasted on the end of a wooden produce crate, and never pasted on anything. It comes from the last chapter of a trade that was about to disappear. Within a few years cardboard cartons printed with their own brands replaced the wooden crate, and the paper label went with it. And the microscopic line of type along the bottom of the grass says it was printed halfway across the continent, by the most famous label house in the West.
The batter fills the left side: cream uniform, maroon cap, red-and-white striped stockings and dark cleats, the bat coming through as his weight drives forward. Behind him rises a wooden grandstand with a green roof, its seats crowded with fans, the rail hung with red, white and blue bunting around a small orange G shield, and yellow and red pennants flying along the top. Against a sky-blue background, SAFE HIT stands in huge red block letters edged in white and thrown into three dimensions by a dark drop shadow, with a baseball riding above the A.
Below, the type reads line by line: Texas in purple script, VEGETABLES, PACKED & SHIPPED BY, GULF DISTRIBUTING CO., and WESLACO ▼ TEXAS ▼ U.S.A. Tiny stacked letters sit at the right edge beside CO. Along the bottom of the outfield grass runs the lithographer's imprint in microtype, the mark of the Schmidt Litho. Co. of San Francisco (S.F.). The back is blank. It measures 7 x 5 inches.
This label is from the 1950s, and that decade was the end of the line for its kind. Paper crate labels had branded America's shipped fruit and vegetables since the railroads began carrying fresh produce across the country in the late nineteenth century. Then wood grew more expensive, so did the labor of nailing crates together, and heavy wax-coated cardboard boxes arrived that could survive rough shipping and carry a grower's name printed right on the side. By the middle of the decade cardboard had largely won, and the label business was finished. Packing houses abandoned and burned tens of thousands of unused labels. The ones that escaped, like this one, are leftover stock that never met a crate.
The imprint belongs to the printer that dominated fruit crate label production for half a century. Max Schmidt, born in Germany in 1850, spent six years at sea as a cabin boy and came ashore in San Francisco in 1871. In 1874 he went into partnership with Frederick Beuhler making pictorial cuts for newspapers; by 1876 his own M. Schmidt & Company was printing stock certificates and colored labels by stone lithography, and in 1883 the business incorporated as Schmidt Label & Lithographic Company. The plant burned in 1884 and again in 1886, and the fire that followed the 1906 earthquake destroyed it once more; Schmidt rebuilt on the same site on Second Street near Bryant and opened a new plant in 1908. His artists and engravers worked on limestone slabs and zinc plates, a separate original for every color, and hardly any of them ever signed a label. The company went on to open plants and offices in Florida, Texas, Honolulu, Utah and along the West Coast.
In 1920–21 the firm added a six-story building crowned by a 180-foot clock tower, designed by H. C. Baumann and inspired by the tower of the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company. The story goes that Max Schmidt's will insisted on a thermometer for the outside of the tower over the objections of his own board, and in the end the thermometer went up. Schmidt died in 1936 with his company still one of the most successful lithographers in the country. In 1966 it merged with the Stecher-Traung Lithograph Company to form Stecher-Traung-Schmidt, which operated until 1994, and in the early 1990s the old plant at 461 Second Street was turned into live-work lofts, 27 of them inside the clock tower.
Weslaco stands on part of the Llano Grande, a Spanish land grant in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. On December 14, 1917, an irrigation company sold 30,000 acres there at ninety dollars an acre to the W. E. Stewart Land Company, and the town took its name from the company's initials: W-E-S-La-Co. A partnership of R. C., Dan and Ed Couch with Robert L. Reeves founded the town in 1919. The site was surveyed and platted on September 18, 1919, lots went on sale December 8–10 at $50 to $400 apiece, a post office followed in 1920, and Weslaco incorporated in 1921. The St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway carried its farmers' crops to markets far beyond South Texas.
In 1923 the Texas legislature established Substation Number 15 of the state's agricultural experiment station east of town, on 60 acres bought by the state and 60 more donated by local citizens. Its first supervisor, W. H. Friend, and professor Arthur T. Potts set up the first citrus and insect trials there and tested fruits, vegetables, legumes, cotton and sugarcane. In 1927 they listed what Valley farmers were up against: root rot, freezes, hurricanes, salty river irrigation water, marketing problems and heavy infestations of insects and plant diseases. The substation became the Texas A&M University Agricultural Research and Extension Center at Weslaco.
The Valley's most durable legend was written to sell land. Developers and boosters papered the Midwest with pamphlets about a "Magic Valley" of cheap land and abundant Rio Grande water, and brought trainloads of prospective settlers down from Iowa, Wisconsin and the Dakotas. Promoters such as John H. Shary and Lloyd M. Bentsen wined and dined the visitors and toured them past citrus groves and truck farms. The selling ran on high pressure and sometimes plain trickery; brochures called the Valley's brutally hot summers "temperate." Irrigation transformed the land's price, if not its weather: acreage that sold for 25 cents in 1903 brought $50 by 1906 and $300 by 1910. The field labor came largely from Mexico. Almost 900,000 Mexican nationals settled in the United States during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920, and many of them went to work in the fields of Anglo-run farms in South Texas, growing the crops that crates like this one carried north.
Citrus was the Valley's most important crop, and 1947 and 1948 brought peak harvests. Then came the freezes of 1949 and 1951, which killed 7 million of the Valley's 9 million producing grapefruit and orange trees. The South Texas canning industry, built around citrus, turned for a time to canning vegetables. Texas vegetables, the Valley's other harvest, are what this label was printed to sell.
A safe hit is a clean base hit: the batter puts the ball in play and reaches base on his own. For a shipper it was the perfect promise, a sure thing arriving in good order. And the Valley knew its baseball. The Rio Grande Valley League played in 1931 and again in 1949 and 1950, with clubs at one time or another in Weslaco, Donna, Harlingen, McAllen, Brownsville, San Benito, La Feria, Laredo, Robstown, Del Rio and Corpus Christi. It was Class D ball, moving up to Class C for 1950. The Corpus Christi Aces won the championship in both 1949 and 1950, and in the 1950 playoffs Harlingen beat Brownsville four games to two before losing to Corpus Christi in the finals. Among the league's players that last season was Monty Stratton, the former Chicago White Sox pitcher who lost a leg in a 1938 hunting accident, fought his way back to pitching in the minor leagues, and saw his life made into the 1949 film The Stratton Story starring James Stewart.
New old stock: printed for Gulf Distributing and never applied to a crate. Bright color and a clean, blank back. The photographs show the full label, close views of the batter and the lettering, and the reverse.
Its small size suits a simple frame and mat on a kitchen wall, in a baseball den, or on a Texas and Rio Grande Valley history wall. Grouped with other crate labels it makes a bright run of American commercial art, and it is a natural gift for a Valley family, a baseball fan, or anyone who loves hand-drawn drop-shadow lettering.
It is a 1950s label, from the final years before cardboard cartons ended the crate label trade.
It carries the microtype imprint of Schmidt Litho. Co., S.F., the big San Francisco label house.
Original unused stock: a color lithograph that was never pasted to a crate.
7 x 5 inches.
It is made from the initials of the land company that bought the town site in 1917, the W. E. Stewart Land Co.
Baseball's term for a base hit, the batter reaching base cleanly on a ball he put in play.
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