I went today to the nearest license plate collectors' meet in Milford, Connecticut. These meets always require me to get up before the sun, which wouldn't normally be my choice on a Saturday morning. Compound this with the likelihood that I wouldn't find much new 'tin' worth adding to my collection, and you get an idea of how low my expectations are.
I haven't been going regularly to meets lately -- a combination of counter scheduling and the certainty that the meet will be held somewhere impossible to reach without a car or a ride. (Check out Webster, Massachusetts, on a map sometime if you want a definition of 'middle of nowhere'.) Thanks for the ride, Roger! For that reason it was nice to catch up with some of my plate collecting pals to catch up: to tell our equivalent of big fish stories, to share recent 'finds', to complain about fellow collectors, the DMV, or the state of the hobby.
So it was great to run into one longstanding collector-friend only to learn that he'd been holding onto a plate with me in mind for months. (My collection is in its way so esoteric that fellow collectors have begun to think of me when they spot a plate they wouldn't otherwise be interested in.) He reached into his briefcase and produced the plate illustrated above.
A few words of explanation. Between 1955 and 1988 the New York State Thruway Authority issued small permit plates to motorists on payment of an annual fee. Apart from the first year, only the letters "TWY" indicated the jurisdiction and purpose of the plates. Regular plates were all numeric. A small number of plates were issued sequentially to state judges and elected officials. An even smaller number of plates were issued to state-wide officeholders. These feature the only the appropriate legend, including GOVERNOR, LIEUT. GOVERNOR, ATTY. GENERAL, and COMPTROLLER. I was being offered the attorney general's plate for my birth year, the second year of issue. Wow.
I didn't need any encouragement to add this plate, which fills both my 1956 collection and my much smaller New York State collection. I figured that it was undoubtedly issued to some little known political hack in a Republican administration. I was wrong on both counts. The governor at the time was Democrat W. Averell Harriman. And his attorney general at the time was Jacob Javits.
I'll let his biography speak for itself. He was my first introduction (apart from my mother) to the concept of a Liberal Republican. (Would there were more of them today.) He was senator when I moved to New York from California in 1969; served alongside both Robert F. Kennedy and James Buckley, the poster child for the other wing of the Republican Party; and was defeated in a later primary by Alphonse D'Amato, about whom the less said the better.
So for both me and certainly for many others, he was far from a nobody. And I get to own one of his license plates. Pretty cool.
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