License Plate Memories

Posted on Nov 4, 2015 in Featured | 2 comments

Recently, I found myself staring at my garage wall, which, suffice to say, really isn’t anything out of the ordinary, but there’s lots of stuff hanging on it like car parts and tools, so I have an excuse. What caught my eye were some licenses plates from a few cars I used to own. It’s funny how seeing something as simple as on old plate can instantly bring back memories of that particular car.

Like me, you may also start to remember plate numbers from your past, even though you haven’t seen the car or the plate for decades. It’s a talent useful to no one but you, but hey, another trigger for happy memories is never a bad thing.

For instance, the plate number for my first car, my ’67 Chevelle SS, was ZIU-376, resplendent in the state of New Jersey’s baby blue with white lettering. That plate was turned in when the car was sold in the mid-1980s, but I still remember it.

I’m not sure if my retention skill for that plate was simply born of the fact that it was on my first car or that the vice principal at my high school used to recite it to me in the process of telling me to remove said vehicle from the high school parking lot. It was an ongoing battle between students with cars and the faculty. Technically, we weren’t allowed to park in the lot because it wasn’t large enough to fit all the cars, so we were forced to park on the streets surrounding the school, streets that received shiny new “No Parking” signs, seemingly on a daily basis.

As we searched for parking further and further from the school, we got there later and later. Since detention was time taken away from a job that supported the car and time to wrench on it, most of my friends and I parked in the lot anyway and took our chances.

My conversations with the vice principal were generally short, something to the effect of, “Hey DeMauro, get that monster out of my parking lot!” Among all the late-model commuter cars of the students and faculty, and borrowed luxury cars belonging to students’ parents, the Chevelle stood out, for good reasons in my opinion, but it was an easy target.

While feigning righteous indignation, I’d leave class to go move my car. Yes, I got out of class on a fairly regular basis to drive my Chevelle SS during school hours in search of street parking. They never figured it out, but I’ve always felt that I won that battle.

My wife’s first car was a ’79 Sunbird. Its license plate was ZER-123. Why do I remember it? It was my wife’s first car. A good friend of mine had a plate that began with “ZIT.” I can’t remember the rest of it, but why any high school kid would remember the first part is pretty obvious.

The plate in the photo of this story is from my ’69 Judge, and it too brings back warm memories of the late 1980s. I’ve discussed some of them in blog posts before, so I don’t want to repeat myself, but even though some of those were trials and tribulations, when viewed through the soft-focus lens of nostalgia, they all seem just a little bit better.

My guess is that there are probably license plates hanging in some of your garages that are there because they hold special memories from your younger days. Or, like most of mine, they were turned in long ago, but for some reason you still recall the number. If ever there was a fortuitous time and place to share those memories with like-minded individuals, this is it. Tell us your stories, so we can all revel in what used to be.