Commentary: From stamped metal to digital, the strange history of our GLDN ST8 PL8S

Your answer, please — and no going out to the garage and peeking:

What are the colors of the California license plate?

Just hazard a guess. You must see them a gazillion times a day.

Fine. They’re blue on white. But you could have said gold on black, or even red on white, and you’d have been right.

Ever since California issued its first license plates, in 1914, it’s been trying to keep up with our passion for automobiles.

We now stand at a smidge over 39 million Californians and a smidge over 36 million registered vehicles. Even AI can’t speculate on how many cars have rolled over the roads here in the decades since 1914, but the state has been ever harder pressed to keep changing plate colors and numbers and letters to match those numbers and to dodge any duplication.

And now the DMV has made its latest switcheroo. Since 1980, regular plates have been constructed as number-letter-letter-letter-number-number-number. That entire combination has now run out, so California license plates began this year using number-number-number-letter-letter-letter-number.

Oh for those simpler days — like 1905, when California first required “motor cars” to be registered, but didn’t issue license plates. Drivers sometimes made their own, carved from wood, stamped onto metal, the numbers mounted on screens, or painted onto boards.

In 1914, the state realized it had better get a handle on this, a way to distinguish all of those thousands of black Ford Model Ts from one another, and to put some dough in the state’s road repair kitty while they were at it.

Voila, universal registration, and the license plates to prove it. Registration fees were set by horsepower. If your horseless carriage chugged along at under 20 horsepower, it cost you $5, but if your car ran on 60 hp, you speed demon, you’d pay $30 to register it.

In 1914, the state had 123,504 registered vehicles. Angelenos owned 43,099 of them, and in short order, they all bore the first state license plate: 16 by 9 inches, white letters and numbers on red enamel on steel.

In the same package of auto rules was another requirement: a driving license. It bore the same descriptors we have today, with height, weight, eye and hair color, address. Photos would not appear on licenses until 1958. Drunk drivers were also warned that they would pay fines or spend time in the pokey if caught. The state speed limit was set at 30 mph outside of town, and “motor vehicles must be kept under control so as not to frighten horses.”

And Tesla drivers take note: from their very beginning — except for four or five years because of material shortages — California has required license plates on the back and the front bumpers. Maybe Elon Musk didn’t like the look of a front license plate on his pretty-pretty car, and Teslas aren’t made with the usual front-plate installation accommodations. New Teslas come with a plate mounting kit, but it’s in the trunk for you to install yourself. Look around and see how few Teslas use them. The fine for not having a front plate can run up to $250. The CHP and the LAPD might make a nice little pot of dough if they enforced the plate law.

In 1914, the state’s first official license plate, number 1, went to Chester Weaver, a San Francisco Studebaker dealer. Actually it was won by a Chico car dealership in a lottery drawing among several applicants, but Weaver was bound and determined to have it, and paid what a newspaper at the time described as a “handsome bonus” to the Chico men to get it.

License plates from across the United States adorn a wall inside classic car dealership Beverly Hills Car Club in Los Angeles.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

The 1915 license plate was “poppy color” — yellow with black lettering, chosen cannily to promote the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, a sort of world’s fair.

By the next year, the state had realized all of the trouble and expense of issuing a new plate every year, and so the plate for 1916 was blue on white, and good until 1920, with a little metal tag in the corner changed each year, amusing as little Monopoly tokens.

In 1916 it was a little silver-toned lead California grizzly bear — a creature soon to be driven extinct — and in 1917 a California poppy. In 1918, it was a small lead mission bell, and in 1919, the registration symbol was a red tin star.

The blue-and-white plate was made in Los Angeles by the California Metal Enameling company, in a northeast L.A. neighborhood called Bairdstown — now a part of El Sereno. Not until 1925 did the state’s purchasing agent recommend that license plates be made by inmates at Folsom State Prison for money saving and “advantageous work for the convicts.” That didn’t end up happening until 1947. (Inmates still pound out about 45,000 plates per day.)

A tour group gathers for a photo at the iconic entrance of Folsom Prison.

(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

The state in 1920 also gave up the costlier enamel plates, and switched to stamped metal, in white on black, or black on white, then white on green, black on yellow, yellow on black. They were cheap enough that California could once again send out new plates every year, and in 1939, the plate was yellow on dark blue, and across the top was the phrase “California World’s Fair,” in recognition of the Golden Gate International Exposition.

The metal demands in World War II put a stop to the annual new license plate. Instead, metal strips showing the current registration were fastened atop the existing plate. In the war year of 1944, the registration was a piece of paper inside the windshield.

What inevitably followed license plates were license plate thefts, that beloved switcheroo getaway technique of movie criminals and real ones. The Oakland Enquirer in 1917 wrote about an infuriated Berkeley baker whose plates had been stolen. “He says he will esteem it an everlasting favor if any one will place the thief in his hands for just two minutes.”

In January 1919, an Oakland cop who had studied at art school caught up with a shipworker whose homemade license plate was not well-made enough. Cpl. Joe Wallman saw a front plate that had been repainted from an old car dealer’s license, and the back one had been flipped over and repainted clumsily with a lopsided mission bell — a plate that, alas for the shipworker, had once belonged to the sheriff’s department. “I’ve studied art, and I know perspective,” Wallman declared. “So when I see a bum license plate, my artistic perception is my guide.”

But it was a notoriously heinous crime in the 1920s that nudged the state toward putting only six large figures — instead of seven — on the 1929 license plates.

In December 1927, a 12-year-old Los Angeles girl, Marion Parker, was checked out of her school by a man posing as an employee of her father, Perry Parker. The kidnapper demanded a $1,500 ransom.

Marion’s father met the kidnapper — William Hickman — a couple of nights later. The kidnapper, William Hickman, in the driver’s seat of a Chrysler coupe, leveled a gun at him and demanded the money. Perry Parker saw his daughter in the passenger seat, and handed over the ransom. Hickman shoved Marion out of the car as he drove off. Only then did her father realize she had been murdered — her arms and legs cut off, her body disemboweled, and her eyes wired open to make it look as if she were alive.

Witnesses could read and remember only three figures on Hickman’s seven-figure license plate, and the state decided to switch to six large figures “to improve visibility and safety.”

The 1930 license plate tried something new: regional identifying letters. A through E were assigned to Sacramento and Northern California, G and H to Oakland, J and K to San Francisco, L to Fresno, M through Y to Los Angeles, and San Diego got stuck with Z. This system too was supposed to be useful for lawmen, but it didn’t last long.

Like Picasso, California plates had their color epochs. The gold-on-black period of the classic-car 1960s, then gold-on-azure plates into the 1980s, and the classic blue on white since then.

If you see a red-on-white license plate, it’s on a historical vehicle, one that’s at least 25 years old and of “historic interest.” The DMV sells reproductions of the iconic gold-on-black plates, and more than a dozen special interest plates to support special causes: the arts, breast cancer research, museums, agriculture, Yosemite, coastal and Lake Tahoe conservation. Californians can now order a costly digital plate that updates remotely, and in a sleek-looking white-on-black color scheme.

You won’t be surprised to know that the biggest, splashiest plate ever was the personalized plate — the vanity plate, debuting in 1970 for $25 extra, money destined for air pollution research. For more than a half-century, it has also helped Californians find their cars in crowded parking lots.

Within the first month, the DMV got more than 3,000 orders, and it had to create a new and specialized workforce to screen plate applications for dirty words and phrases and politically or religiously offensive ones.

Burt Blum with his personalized license plate the Department of Motor Vehicles sought to recall as “offensive.” This photo was published in the L.A. Times on Sept. 14, 1973.

(John Malmin / Los Angeles Times)

There were hundreds of requests for run-of-the-mill plates reading CHEVY or TBIRD and their variants, for SURFER and HORSES and such pursuits. Celebrities who nowadays would want to drive anonymously ordered their own. Dean Martin’s classic Stutz bore the license plate DRUNKY, and early fitness guru Jack LaLanne put REDUCE on his Cadillac’s bumpers.

The DMV staff immersed itself in foreign language and slang dictionaries, pig Latin, and even used mirrors to figure out sneaky meanings of obscure plate applications with unusual combinations of letters, symbols and numbers. A couple of extremely vulgar ones, in Spanish and in Polish, passed DMV muster, but two inmates making license plates at Folsom recognized them for what they really were.

A few drivers took the DMV to court to challenge the rejections. GAYLIB was originally turned down before a new DMV director ordered it to be issued. POT 4 ME was rejected back then, but might not be now. (I still admire whoever it was who got TORO POO approved.)

The San Francisco Chronicle printed a few applications and explanations in 2014.

A driver wanted “RXFORXS,” which he said meant “prescription for success.” The DMV rejection: “RX [drugs] for SX [sex].”

One driver’s explanation for TINY (HEART SYMBOL) ON,” “Tiny is my nickname and ON is the initials of my girlfriend.” The DMV was not amused. “Tiny hard on, sexual connotations.” Rejected.

In 2013 the DMV turned down DOOTERS. The applicant argued that it was his daughter’s nickname, but a DMV worker unearthed it in an urban dictionary as a portmanteau of “dude” and “hooters” — male breasts.

Robert and Lynn Klees of Fullerton receive the state’s first personalized license plate, AMIGO, from then-Gov. Ronald Reagan in October 1970 at the Airport Marina Hotel in Los Angeles.

(John Malin / Los Angeles Times))

The same year, a school bus driver near San Diego applied for and got plates reading NOT SEE. The DMV began getting complaints about the plate, which was held in place by a plate frame with a swastika. The driver was suspended from his job and the “Nazi” license plates canceled.

In the fall of 1970, the DMV made a big production of the debut of personalized plates. The very first one read AMIGO, and Gov. Ronald Reagan presented it to Robert and Lynn Klees of Fullerton, who chose it because, said Klees, “I want people to know we’re proud of our Mexican heritage.”

Dozens of people applied for a NO SMOG plate, and Reagan had to pluck the winning application out of a hat. Edgar Jacobs of La Cañada triumphed, and a Times photo showed him putting his new license plate on his car, but offered no specifics about what kind of car it was. “Aren’t they beauties?” he said as he screwed the plates into place.

Reagan had beamed when he revealed the NO SMOG plate winner. “This is just like the Oscars,” he said. “May I have the envelope, please?”

Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison

Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.