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CM . . .
. Volume IX Number 8. . . . December 13, 2002
excerpt: THE LICENSE PLATE as we know it had simple beginnings. In 1901, it was nothing more than the owner's initials painted on the back of the vehicle. Since these initials were too hard for policemen to find and read, they made a new law. For a $1.00 fee, each vehicle was assigned a registration number. An owner then made his or her own license on a leather pad or metal plate and bolted brass numbers on it. In some states, people made plates out of rubber or had them made at the local saddlery or blacksmith shop. In Canada, most people made plates out of leather or rubber, and in some cases they painted the numbers right on the car. The Way Cool License Plate Book is a quick, fun read, and along the way youngsters and adults will pick up bits of information too. The book is divided into eight parts with the majority of it, the final six sections, being given over to full color reproductions of more than 350 vanity plates from the United States and Canada. The plates are organized by theme: Occupations (4CASTR - forecaster); Animals (BIZZEB- busy bee); Car Terms (AHEADAU - ahead of you); Exclamations (OIMSOL8 - Oh, I'm so late); Sports Terms (W8LIFTR - weightlifter); and Sayings (PSAKAKE - piece of cake). While Wise does not provide the answers to "translating" each plate, he does offer a clue under each plate: "BCNYA - Not if I see you first." Occasionally interspersed among all of the vanity plates are "Plate Facts," license plate shaped rectangles containing trivia about, what else, license plates: "To conserve metal during WWI plates in Ontario were made of stiff cardboard in 1915 and 1916." The book's opening one page "History" section offers a brief overview of the history of license plates in the United States and Canada, and there readers can learn, for instance, that the first state issued license plates have been around for a century while the first vanity plates appeared in 1937 in Connecticut. The second section, "Games," which is six pages long, provides 27 games which are divided as to level of difficulty. "Games for Younger Kids" includes the "Alphabet Game" in which children, after writing down all the letters of the alphabet, cross them off their list as they find them on license plates they see. An example of a more complicated game would be a version of bingo in which the players create BINGO cards using combinations of letters and numbers, and then the "caller" uses the license plates of passing cars to call out letters/numbers. Although The Way Cool License Plate Book will principally be a book for recreational reading, teachers could use it for curricular purposes as well. For example, an English or History teacher might share some of the book's vanity plates and then ask her/his students to create the vanity plates that would belong to fictional characters from literature or real historical figures. Recommended. Dave Jenkinson, who does not have a vanity plate, teaches courses in YA literature at the Faculty of Education, the University of Manitoba.
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