Auto Restoration 101

As a kid I remember my mom saying “You better stay out of trouble or you’ll end up making license plates” I now know for a fact that she wasn’t lying. I read this post on Hemmings Auto Blog and had to share.

New Jersey is the Garden State. Indiana encouraged you to Wander. Pennsylvania is the Keystone state. Idaho, Famous Potatoes. Half the reason we know such trivial ephemera is because they’re stamped on license plates, many of them from the time before vanity plates allowed our own messages to trump the States’.

So what do we make of this Montana plate from the early ’60s? Prison Made, indeed. Sounds like a song that Johnny Cash never wrote. So if you don’t like your tags, is that where you go for a refund? Were they soliciting employment from clueless recruits? Or were residents worried that those free-market glory hogs over in Nebraska were making their plates for them?

Later silver-and-black Montana plates, ca. 1963, did away with the Prison Made tag altogether. Shame.