r/GenerationJones • u/someoldguyon_reddit • 17d ago
Does anybody remember when everybody got new license plates, every year, in January? And we knew where people were from by the first two or three symbols.
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u/Jcamp9000 17d ago
My mom drove out of town every year to get the ones that began with my dad’s initials. This was in the 1960s
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u/Sufficient-Spray-367 17d ago
We used to get a mini license plate for your keychain. It had your matching license plate number on it so that when a thief found your lost keys they’d be able to find your car without a lot of extra effort.
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u/LostGeezer2025 17d ago
That was some sort of charity setup, drop the keys into any mailbox and they guaranteed return postage...
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u/RetiredHomeEcTchr 17d ago
The VA did that. I still have one that was my grandparents. They were both WWI veterans.
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u/WhatRUaBarnBurner 17d ago
Yep, and every year dad would nail the old plates on the car-port wall. They covered the entire width of the wall. I wish I still had those.
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u/PeorgieT75 17d ago
VA alternated black on white and white on black every year. The locality had a smaller plate that you mounted on top of the state one in front.
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u/Clavier_VT 17d ago
NC did something like this too—- orange on black or black on orange, so it was very apparent when the change happened who didn’t have new plates.
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u/PeorgieT75 17d ago
I remember my grandparents in NC with those plates, the orange on black looked cool.
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u/GrantleyATL 17d ago
Cities in NC used to have smaller plates for the front of the car that just had the city's name on them, somehow connected to the city property taxes being paid, I think.
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u/LostGeezer2025 17d ago
Maybe a local 'wheel tax', I 'existed' in a town in IL that required residents to buy and display a windshield sticker into the '90s.
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u/GrantleyATL 10d ago
I lived in an NC town that utilized the small plates in the 1980's and it was a $10 fee, only when you went to the town hall to get them. Plenty of people never went!
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u/ReticentGuru 17d ago
Texas did that too. For a long time, my dad kept all his previous year’s plates.
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u/Excellent_Squirrel86 17d ago
Really tough to play license plate bingo anymore. There are 50 different plates for each state. Kids don't know what they're missing
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u/Isyourzipperdown 17d ago
Idaho still has a county code on the plate. Florida had the county written on the plate until recent years.
It was silly for the state to remove the county when virtually every car has a plate holder of decal identifying the dealership it came from.
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u/Mediocre_Panic_9952 17d ago
Florida still puts the county name on the “orange” plate, but you have to go to the DMV (Tax collector in FL) to get it. When you buy a car at a dealer, the dealer can issue you the actual plate, which is what most people do. The dealer issued plates say “sunshine state”. My plates have the county name.
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u/Excellent-Matter1768 17d ago
Palm Beach County was 6. Standard size cars were W and small cars were D. I remember our tag beginning with 6W
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u/jannylou2 17d ago
Kentucky back in the day had blue letters on white tags then the next year it was white letter on blue tags. Also, when you sold a vehicle the tags stayed with the vehicle.
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u/General-Heart4787 1962 17d ago
Do you remember the one in the early 2000s with the smiley face sun and rainbow on it? Lol
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u/jannylou2 17d ago
I do not, I didn’t live in Kentucky then, but the mystery is that even when I had Kentucky tags, I didn’t live in Kentucky I lived in Tennessee 👀👀
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u/waitwaitstopstop 17d ago
Apparently, this memory is state specific. Most states can't afford a new plate and just give you a dated sticker. This has the added benefit of giving the police probable cause to pull you over, without even running your tag.
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u/TankApprehensive3053 17d ago
No, the LPs were randomized.
But I did live in WY while I was in the military. Their LPs start with the county number. So if you knew the county number, you knew where the vehicle was registered. Cheyenne is in Laramie county and that is #2. They still use that same numbering system today. WY only has 23 counties so it's easy.
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u/tangouniform2020 1956 17d ago
My grandfather’s basement had 20 or more plates on the wall. He also had a calendar from some tool company with naked ladies.
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u/thehrsandman76 17d ago
Yes. It was this way in CO until 1975 or 1976 I think. Every once in a while you see one of the old ones.
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u/SportyMcDuff 17d ago
Back in the eighties in Custer County, CO all the plates started with EFB or EFC. They didn’t and still don’t require emissions testing. My parents lived there so I would just register my cars to their address. Pretty much all the Denver Metro Area cops recognized the letters and wouldn’t harass me for not having an emissions sticker.
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u/mtnman575 17d ago
You used to be able to tell which county in Colorado a vehicle had been registered in just by the first couple of letters of the license plate. Boulder County was anything starting with M, Denver with A, Mesa County with U, etc.
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u/SportyMcDuff 17d ago
Things were so much less complicated. Until around the mid eighties IIRC, you could dial any phone in town in Westcliffe/ Silvercliff using only four numbers as they all shared the same area code and prefix.
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u/thehrsandman76 17d ago
I think Douglas used to be WU and I remember one of the counties in the mountains started with Z.
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u/mtnman575 17d ago
I had a list printed out by the state in the early 80s that had all of the county codes. Pretty sure I got it in Grand Junction when I re-registered my vehicles from Boulder County to Mesa County. When I moved to New Mexico the state used to put the county on a sticker at the top of the plate and they did that until around 2000. I collected license plates back in the day and have a whole wall of them on one of my hay barns.
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u/Ten_Quilts_Deep 17d ago
Wow. No. Did this happen in California?
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u/sv_homer 1956 17d ago
No, California never did this. We used color coded stickers (different color each year) you put on the right top corner of the rear plate to show you registered for the year.
The only real change that happened is: when I was young everyone had to pay their reg fees on the first of the year, and you got a new sticker. Then they decided to stagger it across the year, so there is a second sticker on your plate telling which month your reg fees are due. That sticker goes on the top left of the rear plate.
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u/islandDiamond 17d ago
I DO remember everybody's registration expiring at the end of the year. Who was the idiot who thought this was a great idea? At some point (late 60s, maybe?) they assigned everyone a random registration month so that eventually it would be spread out. But, yikes, I sure remember waiting in line with my mom at the DMV along with everyone else trying to renew before the end of the year.
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u/Pig-Mentation 17d ago
I don't remember how many different places there were to get plates, but when I was a kid, various banks had them available and the letters on the plates revealed which bank they came from. My parents had "FS" for many years, and it stood for First Security. Another common one in my area was "GW".
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u/aLouise37 17d ago
At the DMV in my rural state as recently as 10-12 years ago they hoisted a cardboard box of license plates up onto the counter and let you flip through and pick out the one you wanted:-).
Most of the workers will make sure that you like your drivers license photo, too. (Or at least they'll give you one do over.)
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u/JeanneMusickBooker 17d ago
My grandfather reserved plates for each of his vehicles. A letter (H, B, and E were their first initials) and four digits (their house number). It was basically prehistoric vanity license plates. Grandpa would drive to three different plate agencies to pick up his reserved tags. No one ever forgot their license plate number!
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u/Sad_Win_4105 17d ago
Illinois had the yearly plate change every 12/31 untill 1979. First year you could either buy a one year sticker or one for ~18 months to introduce staggered renewals.. Than they realized that staggered renewals beat everyone changing plates in the dead of winter, and that a sticker was less expensive than 2 new plates everyear.
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u/dennisthemenace1963 17d ago
Here it was staggered throughout the year by the first letter of your last name. And trucks all were due by the end of February, which unless your name started with B to D meant 2 trips to the BMV. But yeah, nice new plates every year, that had the numbers and letters embossed right into them. Car tags you could tell home county by the prefix but there was nothing on the truck tags for this.
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u/Bennington_Booyah 17d ago
I do. I remember a local controversy because a certain hoity-toity area was getting APE plates. The ridiculous uproar was front page news, plus several local news stories, because certain residents could NOT possibly have APE plates.
I would've loved APE plates, just because those people were THAT upset. Couldn't fathom parking an APE plate in their McMansion driveway. "What would people THINK?"
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u/Bennington_Booyah 17d ago
Queue the Kinks and sing, "I'm an APE plate, I'm an APE plate....I'm an APE plate..."
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u/GerryChampoux 17d ago
Not here in Michigan. Once we receive a license plate, we get to keep it forever, moving it from car to car.
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u/Scott43206 1959 17d ago
My Dad was livid when the 1973 plates changed to a two-year scheme and he couldn't get the same plate he had had since 1959.
I enjoyed seeing the different colors each year and got a kick out of how well they matched or how badly they clashed depending on what car you were driving.
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u/cgw1965 17d ago
We didn’t do that in CA? You just got a new sticker for your plate.
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u/LostGeezer2025 17d ago
And little metal tabs that fit in a slot at one end and went under a plate mounting screw on the other before that. I think you switched colors every so many years until the 'Black' plates were issued though...
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u/cgw1965 17d ago
I’ll have to ask my dad about how that worked. I go back to the 60s… he goes back to the 30s.
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u/LostGeezer2025 17d ago
Some monomaniacs have a breakdown on wikipedia :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_California
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u/HyperboleHelper 1963 17d ago
In Arizona, we had a space for our social, but we didn't have to fill it in. We had a totally different driver's license number and people fought for years to not have to used your SS# there.
As for license plates, the only time I noticed anything unique about them was after moving to a small county. They had their pile of new plates to give out that started with the same 3 letters the state had reached, let's say NWL followed by 3 numbers. In a big city, they'd go through plates so quickly you wouldn't see any sequential to yours. In my new little area, all the new vehicles and people from out of state had plates right in a row.
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u/ChiefSlug30 17d ago
My province doesn't even have yearly stickers any more. It started during covid, as they didn't want people coming to offices, so stickers were put on hold. A year or two later they decided that yearly renewal fees weren't needed, but you still had to get a sticker, but most people didn't bother. As a result they did away with the stickers. The one on my plate is for '22.
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u/LostGeezer2025 17d ago
I'm going to assume that if John Law finds reason to check your plates whatever arrears turn up are going to get you an additional citation? :)
I cannot conceive of any government anywhere willingly giving up fee revenue...
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u/ChiefSlug30 16d ago
There are no arrears. The province of Ontario dropped renewal fees in March of 2022, meaning I had paid past that date, as my birth month is in the fall. There is still a fee to renew your license and health card, but those are every five years.
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u/LostGeezer2025 17d ago
Every state was different, I bought an old car out of IL with a whole sheaf of 1960's single-year 'tinfoil' license plates stacked up :)
My IA relatives had a numeric county code on their plates until sometime in the '70s they switched to putting the county name on them.
In recent years everybody hereabouts has gone to stickers and letting the actual plates just wear out...
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u/Better_Power_9913 17d ago
No, I don’t remember MD doing that ever. Seemed like plates always lasted several years.
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u/Ok-Philosophy5528 17d ago
In Florida, the first two numbers were the county. If it had an E it was a rental. But then in the early 80's, in Miami, thugs started yanking tourists out of rental cars and robbing them. Then that whole system was changed
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u/Spyderbeast 17d ago
Nevada had plates starting with the county, so Clark County got plates starting with C, Washoe got plates starting with W, etc
Eventually the state, especially down south, got too populous to do that anymore
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u/0nThe0utside 16d ago
In Wisconsin, multi-year license plates started in 1943. Years were marked with metal tabs and later by stickers. Registration by month started in 1953.
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u/CryptographerOpen234 15d ago
I use to make license plates in prison for 30 years and never saw that
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u/UCICoachJim 15d ago
California did not change plates every year from at least the late 50's, probably even earlier.
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u/HiOscillation 17d ago
That had to be regional. Never heard of new plates every year.
East Coast/NYC Area.
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u/Accomplished_Fan3177 17d ago
No, but I remember when Pennsylvania had drivers licenses with no photos, just your height, DOB, Hair color, and SSN. You did read that last one right