Article by Ed Quillen
License Plates – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
THIS WAS BACK in the late 1970s, when we owned the Middle Park Times in Grand County and I was talking to some friends who owned a newspaper in adjacent Clear Creek County. I made some joke about them enjoying a “wise” readership because their county’s license plates had the “YY” prefix — two Y’s, which made them “wise,” etc.
The fellow I was talking with had grown up in Grand Rapids, Mich., and after he got the joke, he asked “What is it with you people from Colorado, paying so much attention to license plates? Nobody cares about them anywhere else.”
Never having lived anywhere else, I cannot speak about their license-plate habits, but it is true that some Coloradans pay a lot of attention to license plates, and they aren’t all just old grouches like me.
Last fall I was at the Headwaters Conference in Gunnison, where we were discussing possibilities for a “Code of the West” — what sort of things people should know when they move into an area like Gunnison County.
One college student said “Don’t trust anybody with EYD plates. EYC means they’ve been around a while, but the EYD’s often belong to newcomers.”
Another student informed me that “It’s sort of cool if you’ve got an older plate with a dash instead of the new ones that don’t have dashes.” That is, ABC-123 outranks DEF4567, and although I didn’t ask, I’d wager that GH-8901 would beat them both.
Thus the emerging generation of educated Coloradans continues to use the license plate as a status symbol — a symbol of one’s status as determined by length of residency and political connections in a given location which is indicated in the alphabetic prefix.
An experienced license-plate examiner can, at a glance, tell where a car is registered and approximately how long the owner has lived in that area and quite possibly how much political clout the owner exercised there. Or could, until this year. As a consequence of growth, normal Colorado license plates will no longer indicate one’s county of residence.
THE LICENSE PLATE is almost as old as the automobile, and it serves two formal purposes. It’s a tax receipt, in that it indicates that the appropriate annual taxes have been paid on a vehicle, and it’s a form of identification useful to law-enforcement.
Colorado began issuing license plates in 1913. Before that, car licensing was handled by cities, which issued numbers for car owners to use in making their own plates. In 1919 and ’20, the numbers were not stamped on the plate, but were individual pieces of metal that were welded to the plate.
Sizes varied throughout the 1920s. The more populous counties needed more room for numerals, and their plates could be as large as 16″x6″, as compared to the modern standard of 12″x6″.
As roads improved, more people traveled between counties, leading to complications for law enforcement — there was no easy way to know where a plate with a given number like “578” had come from.
And so, in 1932, the state began issuing plates with county identification. Each county was numbered, based on its population rank in the 1930 census. Denver had the most people, with 287,861 residents, so it was number 1. Chaffee ranked 31st in that census, so its plates had the “31” prefix, Saguache was 35, Lake was 41, and so on to Hinsdale’s 63.
Generally the state issued new plates every year, and every car needed two for front and back. The exception was during World War II when conserving resources was important. Colorado cars needed only a rear plate in 1943, and kept it in 1944 with a validating tab. The one-plate policy continued through 1946 and 1947 in Colorado, and some states, like nearby New Mexico, still use only a back plate.
Aside from wartime, every year’s plates were a different color combination, making it easy to spot a car with 1949’s black-on-yellow when it was supposed to have 1950’s green-on-white.
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License plates were issued for the current calendar year, and expired on Dec. 31. There was a two-month grace period, so you had until March 1 to get the new plates. It led to busy times and long lines at the county clerk’s office, especially as February waned. I can remember my father joking about how he always remembered to buy my mom a Valentine’s Day present every year — new plates for her car.
And I would get dragooned into replacing old plates with new, which gave me a life-long hatred for coping with rusted screws and bolts on February days when zero would be a big improvement on the wind-chill factor.
Another thing I remember from my father’s license-plate commentary was his complaining in 1958.
That was the year that Colorado shifted from county numbers to a two-letter code, and my dad said it was going to be damn near impossible to figure out where a car came from.
Since I don’t really remember the county numbers, I adapted easily, and soon knew that “HY” plates were from our Weld County, “LU” were from Larimer, “ML” from Boulder, etc.
Even though several censuses had transpired since the county numbers were assigned in 1932, the state still used the same sequence in its 1958 assignment of county letters. Little Hinsdale had been county number 63, and now it had the last letter sequence at ZN.
Weld had been number 3, and it was still third, right behind Denver’s AA-GN and Pueblo’s GP-HX. I quickly figured out that the letters I,O, and Q were not used in license-plate designations, because they could be confused with the numerals 1 and 0.
There were a couple of anomalies in this system. For instance, Lincoln County outranked Montezuma in the 1930 census, yet Montezuma was 32 and Lincoln 33. My guess is that their populations were quite close (7,798 and 7,850) and that Montezuma was ahead in some preliminary census count that the state used, while today we have the final figures from that census.
Another quirk was Grand County. All the other “Z counties” — the least-populated counties that brought up the end of the list — were assigned only one prefix, like Custer’s ZA and Park’s ZD. But Grand had both ZB and ZC.
When I lived there, I asked Fay DeBerard, who was a powerful state senator as well as a leading local rancher, about this. He ordered me another drink and hinted that he might have exerted some influence in this matter back then, although he said nothing explicit.
At least Grand County had some license-plate expansion space when the mountain populations began to grow in the 1970s. Others that had been unpopulated backwaters in 1930, like Summit (Breckenridge and ZL) and Pitkin (Aspen and ZG), ran out of license-plate numbers. Pitkin got another prefix, ZP, as did Summit, ZR.
Such prefixes were tip-offs about new arrivals (in Colorado, the plates go with you, not the car, so in general, when you sell a car, you can use the same plates on a new one). It was easy to recognize out-of-county folks, and some tourists were easy to spot because all rental cars had DR prefixes if from Denver and RR if from anywhere else.
And I remember running it on the front page of the Mountain Mail when Chaffee County rolled over from XH-9999 to XJ-1, which went to Jerry Leewaye, then the county assessor and a fellow who insisted it was just a coincidence.
ONE REASON the counties were running out of numbers then is that after 1977, Colorado had quit issuing new plates every year. The same plates would stay on vehicles indefinitely, and small adhesive tabs would indicate whether they had been renewed.
Before that, if XU-303 had been issued in 1972 to someone in Saguache County, and that person had moved to another county that year, then XU-303 would be available in 1973. But after 1977, once XU-303 had been issued, it couldn’t be issued again, even if that person had moved away and gotten new plates and tossed the old XU-303s in the trash.
The other big change in 1977 was that expiration dates were staggered through the year, thereby smoothing the flow at the county clerk’s office.
In 1982, as more counties were running out of license plates, the state switched to a new system. Instead of two letters and up to four digits, as in AB-1234, the state went to three and three, as in CDE-567.
These, too, were assigned by county, although no one seems to know what sequence was used for the assignments. Most of the bigger counties managed to keep their 2-letter prefixes — Denver’s AA expanded to AAA, like Arapahoe’s PH going on to PHA.
The other counties seemed to be in several alphabetic sequences. But it didn’t take long to learn that FAM-FCC meant Chaffee, and FCD-FDE were Lake, etc.
Also, the old county letters remained in use for truck tags, as well as the denim-colored “designer” plates, where Chaffee was X1H instead of XH — not too hard to figure out for those of us who paid attention to such things.
But again, Colorado was running out of license plate numbers in some counties.
The state uses 23 letters on license plates (the 26 letters of the alphabet minus I,O, and Q). So the theoretical limit on the old 2-4 plates was 23 x 23 x 9999, or 5,289,741.
Switch to 3-3, and the limit rises to 12,154,833. The actual number is somewhat lower because there are some three-letter combinations that aren’t used because they might be offensive. Go to 3-4, as the state did in the 1990s, and the limit is 121,657,833.
Surely that’s enough for a state with 4 million people, right?
The problem, according to Dorothy Dahlquist, who’s in charge of answering media questions for the Colorado Department of Revenue, isn’t so much the numbers as how they’re distributed.
Under the system that was in place until the end of 1999, three-letter prefixes were reserved for specified counties.
“If we had a county that was growing rapidly, like Douglas County, it might run through its allocated letters [EHW-EMA],” she said. “And there would be a county like San Juan that was never going to use one of its series [like VZE]. But we couldn’t just re-allocate the plates. So we weren’t running out of numbers state-wide, but we were facing that risk within certain counties.”
And so, starting with plates issued in 2000, there will be no indication of what county a car is registered in. A county clerk might run through her ALR plates, order some more, and get BMZ tags.
These are being phased in over four years; by the end of 2003, every Colorado vehicle will have one of the new tags. That’s the first general upgrade since 1977, and there are still plates on the road that were issued 23 years ago.
“That’s another problem we’re trying to solve,” Dahlquist said. “Those old plates get beat up and faded, and so law-enforcement has a hard time reading them. By going to new plates, they should all be easy to read.”
The new plates will all be 3-3, with a hyphen in the middle, rather than the current 3-4 without a hyphen, she said. “Law enforcement said the 3-3 is much easier to read, and we’ll have enough numbers to go around when we allocate the prefixes based on demand, rather than by county.”
Some states that use the generic-prefix system also attach decals to the plates indicating the county. Dahlquist said this was never considered in Colorado, although she didn’t know why.
THAT’S A PITY. When I see out-of-county cars parked on the street, I like to know where they’re coming from, though I’m not too sure why. One place where it is useful is when you’re traveling in Colorado and looking for a place to eat — knowing your county prefixes means you can find the place where locals eat, as opposed to the franchise outlets.
But I don’t think these new license plates, and the loss of county identity, resulted from a conspiracy of franchise-restaurant owners.
Or not directly, at least. I think we rural residents carry a fair amount of prejudice against “outsider city people,” who are easy to spot by their license plates.
The overwhelming majority of Colorado’s population is “outsider city people,” and this is a democracy.
So the legislature, when it set up this new system in 1998, acted in accordance with the desires of the majority. They’d like to be able to drive in rural areas without us knowing where they’re coming from.
I’m not in the least embarrassed about what county I live in, and I certainly don’t care if my car tells people that — but I know it bothers some people if we can figure that out about them. Some even consider it an invasion of their privacy.
So the new plates won’t convey as much prestige as our old plates.
AND I HAVEN’T EVEN MENTIONED the numbers that come after the letters, which is where the status game really kicks in.
The rule is simple: the lower your license number (assuming you’ve got your county’s lowest 2-letter prefix), the higher you rank.
For example in Grand County, the best plate to have was ZB-1, which belonged to Chancy Van Pelt when I lived there. Chancy wasn’t from some long-established pioneer family. As I recall, he grew up in Kansas. He was a former county sheriff who took some bullets in the line of duty once when apprehending an escaped murderer, and ZB-1 was a mark of community respect.
County clerks issue license plates, and they’re the ones who deal with the numbers. When I was growing up in Weld County, the clerk and all the commissioners were Republicans, and the three commissioners got HY-1, HY-2, and HY-3; the number depended on the commissioner’s district.
This happened every year, until one year a Democrat got into the clerk’s office. She announced that henceforth, those coveted low-number plates would be issued on a first-come, first-served basis.
All three commissioners protested, with one observing that “People know that those belong to us. Suppose now that somebody drives by a bar and sees HY-1 in the parking lot. That could ruin our reputations, make people think we’re a bunch of drunks.”
As best I recall, the clerk held firm and the commissioners’ reputations survived. I have read about some counties where the low numbers were awarded in a drawing. And I must confess that I tried to get into this game when I lived in Grand County. It was in early 1977, when the state was issuing all new plates, and I asked Johnny Lou Petty, the county clerk, for the lowest number I could get.
Grand County had issued the same numbers to the same people every year, for as long as anyone could remember. She said she’d check — the really low numbers were all taken and would probably be issued to the same people again, but people did move away, and I might get one. She set aside ZB-139 for me, but for some reason I didn’t get there in time. Instead, our editor got that status-symbol license plate (for all I know, she’s still using it), and I got some number that I’ve since forgotten.
The only low-number ZB that I still own is a trailer license plate, and I can’t use that because the trailer wasn’t licensed for several years while it sat out in a friend’s farmyard, and once a plate has been out of use for more than a year, the state won’t let you resurrect it. I was dismayed to find out I’d have to use some generic B192676 instead of ZB-657.
IT ISN’T JUST LOW NUMBERS people want. Back when new plates were issued every year, the old plate, if it had the right number, could be nailed to the fence or front porch and used to display the street number.
My cousins in Douglas, Wyo., used to have that arrangement with the Converse County clerk — they got the same number, their street number, every year.
And I have some evidence of this occurring in Salida. While working on our old shed, I found the customary rural patches for knotholes — old license plates. Several of the plates, from different years, said “31-126.” Since this house has a street number of 126, I’m pretty sure I know what was going on back when the place was owned by William Marquardt, publisher of the weekly Salida Record.
I asked Mary Ellen Belmar, who was Chaffee County Clerk from 1983 to 1999, if license-plate numbers were still a concern for county clerks.
“I just issued them on a first-come, first-served basis,” she recalled, “but that didn’t suit some people. There was one man who asked me to set aside a certain number for him. I told him we didn’t do it that way, and he’d just have to come up and buy the plate whenever that number came up, if he really had to have that number.”
She said that when that number came close, “he called every half hour to find out if we were about ready to issue it yet, and finally, he ended up coming to the courthouse and sitting on a chair next to the counter until we got to the number he wanted.”
The other numeric complication she remembered is biblical, from Revelation 13:18: “the number of the beast … is Six hundred threescore and six.”
Belmar said that “When the number 666 came up, nobody wanted it. People would refuse to take a plate like FBA-666. It got to where, when we’d get a box of new plates, we’d just pull out the 666 and void it right away, since we knew that it was unlikely that anyone would take it.”
For my part these days, neither of my license plates is much of a status symbol, especially the FBN-326. The XJ-2555 on the other vehicle does provide some “old-timer” status, although not as much as XH-25 would, but the number is easy to remember.
So I was glad to hear that the state will accommodate those of us who want to keep our 2-4 license numbers.
Dorothy Dahlquist at the Revenue Department explained that, about three months before one of those plates expires, the owner should get a letter.
“And if you respond in time,” she said, “then you’ll get one of the new-style plates, but it will have your old number, and it won’t cost you anything extra.”
So I’ll probably do that when the time comes. I’m not too fond of the design of the new plates — the chaste white-on-green with the mountain outline seemed perfect for Colorado. Judging by how often that theme is replicated on bumper stickers, key chains, and the like, a lot of other people think so, too — it is an excellent graphic design, and they should have left it alone.
But at least Colorado isn’t using its plates for political slogans (like “Live Free or Die” in New Hampshire), or marketing state products (“Famous Potatoes” from Idaho), or complicating the design with four-color tourism promotion (“Ski Utah!” and a sandstone arch, or Devil’s Tower joining the traditional cowboy on the Wyoming plate).
Little wonder that people in those other places don’t pay much attention to their gaudy license plates — they’re too busy trying to get us to pay attention to them.
Ed Quillen drives in Salida under the alias XJ-2555.