“If an expired license plate means another decoration for your living room wall … you might be a redneck.”
— Jeff Foxworthy
“I’m going to the courthouse to get new tags for the car,” I remember my grandfather saying as he tapped his pipe on the ashtray to empty the remains of Prince Albert tobacco.
“You want to go with me.”
That was a no-brainer. It meant he would let me drive as soon as we got out of sight of the house. I was still a couple of years short of the required license age of 14. But my grandfather saw no harm in teaching a youngster how to drive with behind-the-wheel instruction on the way to the hardware store, the gas station or the courthouse.
My grandmother, on the other hand, was adamantly opposed.
“Take him out to the pasture where I learned how to drive,” she reprimanded him.
I loved my grandmother, but that declaration always puzzled me. They lived in town.
There was no pasture.
My grandmother was also a wise woman.
So maybe there was a message in there somewhere.
Going to the courthouse to get new tags, as license plates used to be characterized, was once a springtime ritual in Texas when every car and truck license expired on the same date. Lines were long at the license office on that last day.
Like many back then, my grandfather hung expired tags on the wall of his garage.
I don’t have expired plates on my living room wall … yet. But I do have a wall of them in my garage. A 40-year collection spanning a brand new, still with a paper divider, set of 1929 plates up into the ‘70s, About the time my interest in cars and plates begins to wane.
A look at the history of the often-ignored license plate is intriguing. Texas first required registering motor vehicles in 1907. Car owners made their own license plates in the beginning, most often by attaching metal numbers to a piece of wood using a “serial number” assigned to them by the county.
That remained the norm until 1917, when the state began issuing metal license plates.
Like cars of the era, license tags came primarily in black.
Random years saw some orange plates before the state began alternating the two colors every year. Made it really hard to spot anyone driving with expired tags. In 1957, the alternating colors were changed to white with black letters and black with white letters. That was the style in the early 1960s when I began driving.
“How do I get plates like those black and white ones,” I asked while in the courthouse a few weeks ago to renew the registration on my Tahoe. I noticed the new black plates with white letters when they were offered as personalized, or “vanity” plates a few years ago. They reminded me of the 1968 black plate with white letter design I attached to my burgundy 1965 Chevelle Malibu SS that year.
Those of us harboring an appreciation for old cars also appreciate old license plates. We also remember heartwarming moments like
that. I bought my first vanity plates in the 1970s, soon after Texas began offering them.
Mine read “CAMEO.”
Looked great on the first vehicle restoration I attempted, a 1956 Chevrolet Cameo Carrier pickup.
Regular issue plates in the ‘70s were white with letters of black, green or red until 1999. That’s when arguably the ugliest license plates any state ever conceived was adopted. Supposedly symbolizing all things Texas with a space shuttle, cactus, a cowboy, and I forget what else, was incorporated into the design.
Thankfully, in 2012, the issue of white with black letters replaced them.
And they remain as the standard. Probably will be for a while, as the Department of Motor Vehicles reported recently, they have no plans to change the design anytime soon.
Contemplating plates also reminded me that misuse of tags can come with consequences. A long-ago moment of temporary insanity when learning to make license plates in a state prison loomed large.
That was the summer between college semesters spent working in my uncle’s body shop in California.
Amazing as it may seem, money intended for college funds found its way into purchasing a Southern California hot rod Ford Model A with a hopped-up DeSoto Hemi motor.
I thought it was college related. Besides books and other college stuff, a guy also needed a cool car.
Needing to drive the yet unregistered car to the shop for a paint job one night, borrowing the front plate off my friend’s ’57 Chevy seemed a reasonable solution. MPHS classmate Ronnie Lilly had made the summer trek out west with me.
My plan began to unravel when one of Canoga Park, California’s finest decided he needed a closer inspection. He was about to buy my story about driving the car from Texas until Ronnie passed us and pulled over to see what was happening.
The look on the officer’s face when he discovered Ronnie’s car had a matching plate to the one on my hot rod said it all. Fortunately, he gave me an A for effort. That and an expensive ticket.
So, now this has me thinking. Some of my unique old Texas plates could look pretty good on my living room wall. I believe the feng shui will work if I hang them with the 1950 Studebaker grille near the gasoline station sign.
