Liberty with License

U.S. citizens are beginning to attach more and more importance to a 6-in. by 12-in. piece of metal that is each man's uniquely private property: his auto license plate. And this means that for a growing number of families January is the crudest month. For that is when many new plates are issued, and it is getting so that there are not enough low numbers and letter combinations to go round--no matter what one may be willing to pay.

Take Connecticut, where for an extra $10 a driver may request a plate made up of two, three or four letters. The state permits such plates to be handed down as heirlooms in the immediate family, so that it is harder and harder to get your first choice of initials or your favorite four-letter word. Obvious obscenity and scatology is, of course, barred, but one Connecticut car is registered as MERD--it stands for Milk, Eggs, Raymond Dairy.

Sometimes painful letter combinations turn up unasked for. The wife of a Houston judge burst into the registration office weeping, to beg relief from the ordeal of driving around town with P-U on her car's front and rear. A Los Angeles psychiatrist who found himself with a tag bearing the letters N-U-T explained that, while he did not mind it in the least, he was afraid some of his patients might think he was making fun of them.

In Washington, D.C., finagling for a low number has always consumed considerable time and energy. Most coveted are the tags from 1 to 1250. No. 1 belongs to the president of the board of District of Columbia commissioners (which issues all D.C. licenses). Chief Justice Earl Warren has 10, Drew Pearson 25, Roman Catholic Archbishop Patrick A. O'Boyle 37, Attorney General Robert Kennedy 50. So intense, in fact, has been the infighting for tags that, starting in 1965, the commissioners decreed that apart from the 1-1250 series anybody could order any combination of letters and numbers up to five characters merely by paying an extra fee of $25. Already, customers in search of identity have paid the price, requesting such diverse nomenclature as GWHIZ, MINE, YOURS, RELAX, SMILE, TRASH, CRASH.

This year thousands of Massachusetts car owners will scrutinize their 1964 plates with a fishy eye; last year most of the numbers had begun to flake off the 1963 plates by March. Nobody seemed to know exactly why, and there was much suspicion of skulduggery among the inmates of Walpole State Prison, where Massachusetts plates are made. Walpole's prison publication, The Mentor, recently warned: "Woe be to ye men who made registry plates last year and are desirous of parole this year."

Most states use convict labor to make their license plates, and now and then car owners around the country still unwrap their new tags to find the penciled gag: "Help! I am being held here against my will!"

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