Good Fruit Grower

April 15

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www.goodfruit.com GOOD FRUIT GROWER APRIL 15, 2015 25 make a copy of the label and have it framed and give it to them for Christmas," he said. As he got more serious about collecting, he would trade with other label collectors around the country. He expanded his interest to pears and other geographic areas. He has a couple of hundred apple labels from Australia and one from Cuba. He's been less interested in California labels just because there are so many of them, particularly for soft fruits and citrus. Over the years, several major collections have been broken apart and sold, and he acquired some labels that way. "There are fewer collectors out there now," he said. "In the late nineties it became where most of the label traders were like horse thieves. They'd fi nd something and say there were only two or three in existence when there would be a whole bundle of them, so I quit trading labels." Yard sale He still keeps his eyes and ears open, though, and occasionally goes to major swap meets and checks online. The most he's ever paid for a label is $500. He's never sold one. Some labels, possibly stored in someone's basement for many decades, show up unexpectedly. A couple of years ago he had a call from a person who had bought a box full of items at a yard sale. When the man unpacked the box, he found the bottom was cracked and had been lined with a fruit label to stop things from falling through. He contacted Price and it turned out to be a label he didn't have. Another label, which Price had never seen before, was found in the basement of a Congdon Orchards packing room. "It had gone through the cracks in the wooden fl oor into the basement and was sitting in the dirt, and no one had seen it," Price said. "It's weird how you fi nd stuff." Such a serendipitous fi nd has Price feeling like a kid in a candy store, he said. "In my position when you fi nd something you didn't have, it's kind of fun. If I get two to three labels a year that I don't have, it's pretty amazing." Value Price says his collection of thousands of labels is undoubtedly worth a lot, but his intention was never to build a collection to sell. "I'm not sure someone would pay the full amount that it's probably worth," he said. "It would be piecemealed out, and what do you do with the rest?" He has a couple of dozen labels that are the only ones known to be in existence. "What kind of value do you put on that?" he asked. "If there's only one left, is it worth $1,000? Is it worth $10,000? What is it worth?" Organizing Nowadays, Price is focusing less on collecting and more on documenting, scanning, and organizing his labels. They're fi led in special display books categorized by the name of the producer. He keeps copies of labels he knows of but doesn't yet own, with the idea of substitut- ing a real one when he fi nds it. Many labels differ only slightly. Typically, a label design would be reproduced with three different back- ground colors to denote the different grades of fruit. Some of the text might differ because of changing stan- dards over the years, so there might be almost identical labels but with different weights indicated, such as 40 pounds net, a bushel, or not less than 42 pounds. He has all known Price Cold Storage labels except one, and he has a copy of that. One of their brands was Priceless. Some of his copies are from the Yakima Valley Museum, which has the world's largest collection of Yakima fruit labels. O t h e r s a r e f r o m t h e S m i t h s o n i a n Museum's collection of 300 to 400 apple labels that were donated by the family of a New York City collector. Price is a trustee of the U.S. Apple Association and has visited the Smithsonian three times while in Washington, D.C., for meetings. He had to make appointments in advance, and museum staffers watched over him as he looked through the labels. Though modest in scope, the Smithsonian collection includes some unusual Yakima labels that even the Yakima Valley Museum lacks and that possibly no one else in the world has. Price was able to obtain digital images of those. He has also been talking to Smithsonian staff about perhaps donating his far larger collection to them some day so that it can be on public display. For example, he has 400 different labels of Skookum alone. Price says his two children are not involved in the fruit industry and probably not interested in maintaining the collection. Son Tyler recently graduated from Stanford University with a master's degree in business adminis- tration and works for Apple in California. Daughter Jamie works for Morgan Stanley in Bellevue, Washington. "They're in their late twenties, and their goal is not to sit around and work on a collection of anything," he said. • ON TJ MULLINAX/GOOD FRUIT GROWER s box labels but one, and he has a "My joy in doing this initially was I knew a lot of people who were no longer in the fruit business, so I would make a copy of the label and have it framed and give it to them for Christmas." —Bob Price Eva, probably the oldest of the labels pictured, dating back to the 1910s or 1920s, was a brand of Lastreto and Company Inc., a broker in San Francisco, California, which had Northwest producers pack fruit in boxes with its labels. Kettle Falls was a brand of Richey and Gilbert Company, a forerunner of the current Gilbert Fruit Company. TJ MULLINAX/GOOD FRUIT GROWER

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