"random Dad" (2008), Unity Maine en route to see The Waybacks play that day at Unity Center for the Performing Arts
If you haven’t automatically assumed that some level or form of insanity is at play here you might be asking… why? It’s not a long story, but it goes back to my childhood in the 70′s when I met my Dad for the first time around age six.
By the time I was nine years old, I was visiting my Dad in New Jersey a couple of times a year. He usually drove down to pick me up in Maryland. Since I was just getting to know him for the first time in my life, the drives up and down I-95 stick out in my memory and were certainly formative experiences for me.
Something I apparently never forgot about those drives was my Dad’s curious habit of pointing out cars with vanity plates. At that age, the idea of other cars on the road was something I hadn’t yet considered beyond the fact that they were mostly different than the car I was riding in and that about half of them weren’t going the same way we were. I recall occasionally looking at other license plates because the non vanity Maryland license plate on my Mom’s 1968 Dodge Dart was DAM 198, which was an ongoing family joke because my frequently angry, fiery red haired Mother had the habit of cursing at other drivers long before I realized I would eventually start driving. I don’t think I had ever taken note of or perhaps even seen a vanity license plate before those rides with my Dad though.
With each vanity plate we would pass, he quickly deciphered the meaning and either bellowed in laughter or smirked as appropriate. In the mid 70′s, vanity plates were not as common as they are today. If you had one back then, you were beyond hip without a doubt. My Dad, a lifetime New Yorker, worked at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital at the time. He later got roué as his own vanity plate (adding the accent with a Sharpie).
My Dad has always been into photography although I don’t believe he has ever photographed a vanity plate. He tried to get me interested in taking pictures by sending me various photography books that I only superficially perused. Later, when I was in the Boy Scouts, our Scoutmaster also influenced me to get into photography, but I got into other things that made me camera shy before I was able to make it to Eagle Scout.
In 2002, at the beginning of my four year startup experience with Textamerica.com, I started using a camera phone to make up for lost time by taking a lot of pictures. I guess it was my excitement and enthusiasm over the service we created at “TA” because it was the very first to enable average users to send pictures from camera phones (which were brand new in 2002) to the web. Within a short time, we had more users than we knew what to do with. “Management” finally pulled the plug after losing a lot of money over a period of four years, but I was hooked on the idea of what was only later called “Live Blogging” and about a dozen other names that involve taking pictures and broadcasting them to the web as they happen. With good old “TA” in the dotcom deadpool, I started a Pro account with Flickr continue to archive vanity plate pictures daily. I have seen this space evolve from the beginning and it is still exciting to watch it grow.
So, that’s really it! This is the lifelong habit I kept from the earliest interaction with my Dad. Somewhere around 2,000 pictures into my “mild obsession” with vanity plate pictures, I decided to attempt something meaningful with them and here we are with a vanityplat.es blog—and the beginning of my attempt to categorize all the pictures. I started Plate Show in 2008 after a short interview for a newspaper story on vanity plates crystallized the idea for me, but found that I had too little time to devote to the idea at that time. So, this is where I’m starting over with the idea with no concrete plan for a “show” or anything… but who knows!
Honnick fell in love with personalized plates as a boy, when he and his father deciphered the ones they saw while traveling on the highway. Now Honnick records plates during his own drives, including trips to visit his father in Maine.
For the Love of Vanity
Lewiston SunJournal 2007
I welcome your feedback, ideas and advice. Please post a comment on any of the photos here or on my Flickr pages. I promise to read them and write a comment back if warranted. You can also send email to show@vanityplat.es