This started as a very minor project that escalated in personal significance very quickly, so please follow along. Or don't. It really doesn't matter to me one way or the other. I'm just killing time here. But I'll try to keep it as brief as possible. Unfortunately, I didn't start taking pictures until about halfway through.
I have several big boxes of old license plates in my attic. As I was going through it recently, I found a license plate frame that I had on one of my cars in high school. I decided that I wanted to put it around an old plate and mount it on my garage wall.
Back in high school, I was driving the 1967 Plymouth Belvedere II hardtop that my grandfather had bought new. It was the nice car in the family and mainly served as my grandmother's transportation. I was in this car for most of my childhood. He eventually gave it to my parents for my older sister to drive, and later I traded my sister a really awful, but much newer 1974 Subaru for it.
I had an uncle who worked for NASA at the time, and he sent up a couple of these license plate frames. My grandfather put one on his car, and I thought it would be cool and goofy to put the other one on my old Plymouth.
My grandfather was a very important guy in my life. He was a precision tool and die maker, and I spent a lot of time at his house. He never had much money, but he could make or repair almost anything. He had a machine shop in the basement of the house that he built (he even cast his own cement blocks for the foundation), and he ran a couple of small businesses out of there. I followed him everywhere, and he taught me how to operate all of the tools and machines. I was operating table saws, band saws, drill presses, grinders, and casting printing type out of molten lead when I was eight years old. The lathe was off limits, but it fascinated me, and I loved cleaning all of the metal chips and swarf out of it. It was a pretty cool place to hang out.
My grandfather passed away in December of 1985. When he died, my parents inherited his car. When my father transferred his own plates onto the car, I asked if I could get my grandfather's old plate registered in my own name, and my Dad made that happen. I have been using that number ever since.
So anyway, I found this old license plate frame, and I wanted to hang it on my wall. I grabbed a shiny new, but obsolete, license plate to put in there, but they just didn't look right together. I decided to rummage through the boxes and find something that might have a better feel to it. I started looking for the oldest version of my plate that I could find. There were a bunch in the box with the same number on it, but I finally came across one that had an October 1987 expiration sticker. It wasn't the plate that I had on the old Plymouth in high school, but it was mine in 1987, and it had also been the number on that car when it still belonged to my grandfather.
The odd thing is that the expiration sticker was stuck in the wrong place. It was supposed to be in the lower right corner, but this one was up higher and kind of crooked. I couldn't figure out why I would have done that, as I was pretty obsessive about the details back then. The plate was pretty dirty, so I hit it with some soap and water to clean it up.
At that point, I noticed that the October 1987 sticker was on top of an older one. It suddenly occurred to me that it was probably covering up a 1985 expiration sticker. After considering that possibility for a moment, I decided to try to carefully remove the 1987 sticker to see what was under it. I ran hot water over the back side of the plate and carefully worked to remove the 1987 sticker with a plastic razor blade, and tossed it into the trash.
This is when I started taking pictures.
I worked very carefully, but unfortunately people used to steal registration stickers, so they were designed to break apart upon removal as an anti-theft measure. The fragile 1985 decal (which would have been placed there in 1983) didn't stay together very well. I was happy that I had exposed the original one, but I was a little disappointed with the results.
And then it occurred to me that the missing pieces might still be attached to the back of the 1987 sticker that I had thrown away. I retrieved it from the trash and very carefully used razor blades to recover the pieces of the 1985 decal.
Right around this point, I tried to imagine what I was doing in October of 1985, where I was, and where I might have been driving in that car.
Suddenly I realized that this wasn't even my plate yet. My grandfather was still alive at that time, and this was the plate off of his car, and probably the last one that he ever laid hands on.
We’re walking on Holy Ground here.
I worked very carefully to retrieve and replace every tiny bit of that sticker that I could find.
It's not perfect, but I am very happy with the results.
Now, I still couldn't figure out why my grandfather would have placed the sticker up in the middle of the plate the way that he had. He wasn't really a car guy, so it was just business to him, but it still didn't make sense
Then I started thinking about the license plate frame. There had been two of them. He and I each had one on our cars, and the frame would have covered the sticker had it been mounted down in the corner.
I went back to the box and found the second frame. I looked at the retaining tabs on the back of the frame, and then noticed bends at the edge of the old license plate that matched the frame. These two things belonged together!
So in the end, I have my goofy Space Shuttle license plate frame ready to display on the garage wall, with a very age appropriate, and personally significant, license plate to go with it.
