COMMERCIAL ART: CITRUS LABELS : Orange Crushes : Those erstwhile tools of California commerce are attracting a passionate group of collectors.

Along time ago, before they fell for movies or sports cars, Californians were in love with the orange.

The fruit was a sort of paradise-on-earth symbol of prosperity that drew Easterners west and led them to plant vast citrus groves.

When they harvested tons of golden fruit, they shipped it back to harsher climates by rail car, and promoted it with flamboyant lithographs of palm trees and orange groves pasted on the ends of the packing crates.

The legacy from this ad campaign is still treasured 40 years after the last wooden crate went east.

Collectors hunt out the labels to frame and hang in kitchens and dens; they stack them in closets, paste them in scrapbooks and covet the ones they can’t locate or can’t stretch their budgets to buy.

“There was cigar art that was just as elaborate . . . there were other fruits with just as many different labels; but citrus has more appeal, somehow,” said Gordon McClelland, co-author with Jay T. Last of “California Orange Box Labels,” Hillcrest Press, 1985.

McClelland figures that there were more than 10,000 variations in citrus labels developed over 70 years. In the early 1950s, labor to build crates became too costly, and stenciled designs on cardboard replaced the sentimental images.

Samples of about 8,000 types of labels have been identified, but “a lot of the really good early ones, there’s only one or two in existence,” McClelland said.

When the labels became obsolete, carloads of them were disposed of by the packinghouses, which had never regarded them as art. Others were rescued from extinction by people such as Bob King, who worked in the houses.

“My wife told me, ‘You better start saving those things,’ so I did,” said King, who now works part time as a Sunkist grower representative.

In the 70s, people such as King formed a trading club, now called the Citrus Label Society, which claims about 200 people worldwide.

The club meets four times a year at Sunkist offices in Sherman Oaks, and about 50 members show up regularly, said Bob Phillips, a charter member who lives in Ventura.

Phillips grew up around the citrus industry in Fillmore and said many of the early club members have similar experiences--although they do not come to the meetings to reminisce.

“We get down to business. It’s buy, sell, trade,” the retired real estate broker said.

Phillips says he has “about 500 of the better type” of labels, many from the 20 or so packinghouses that operated in Ventura County.

Because each house had several brand names denoting different varieties of fruit, and because marketing advisers such as California Fruit Growers Exchange (now Sunkist) influenced them to modernize their homespun trademarks, the number of designs swelled.

When Fillmore Citrus launched a brand called Cupid in the ‘20s, the label looked like an old-fashioned Valentine. Over several printings, it evolved to a commercial art-style cherub with just a head, wings and bold red lettering.

An original Cupid, McClelland said, would now go for four figures, if anybody were willing to sell it.

In contrast, Phillips recalled once asking a manager at Piru Citrus how much the labels cost. “He said it came out to about a half cent apiece.”

Although some collectors are keen on obtaining rare designs and look at them as an investment, others, Phillips said, just like the things. Some people, he said, collect by topic--saving only flower labels or only dogs.

Not all collectors are old-timers. “We have a lot of yuppies in there now,” Phillips said.

A man who deals in nostalgia full time agreed that new people are getting into collecting. Doug Marks, who with his wife Natalie operates a collectibles store in Thousand Oaks called Flash, (named for a citrus brand) said that 20% of their business is in fruit labels. That amounts to a considerable volume, because most are priced at less than $20.

Lots of customers, he says, will buy a Ventura Maid, a Bestgrade from Oxnard or an Endurance from Santa Paula because they live in those cities. One of the most popular local labels is the Sespe brand from Fillmore, which has a picture of the Sespe area that many people recognize. It sells for $5.

Probably the most well-known Ventura County label is Piru Citrus’ Mansion brand, which had different versions of the well-known Cook mansion on it.

“Everybody wants that one,” Marks said. “If you could get one, it would be at least $300.”

Marks is apparently not a man who can take labels or leave them. He is fond of his stock.

“You could just get lost looking at these things because they are so wonderful,” he said. “They are true American art . . . you can see history here.”

The dealer finds that orange and lemon labels consistently outsell those for grapes and apples, or any other kind of label art. Like others in the trade, he attributes this to the mystique attached to them, and to which he is not immune.

“There was,” he said, “lots of romance attached to the citrus industry.”