Home Plate

Since we returned to Massachusetts six months ago, a goal Trudi has had has been to recover  the low number license plate 777 her father  had on his car when she was growing up in Longmeadow.  Her dad had passed the plate on to her second cousin, Laurie, when he moved from Massachusetts to Maine  twenty years or so ago, as  closer relations either did not want the plate or did not reside in Massachusetts at the time.  

Here you can see the plate adorning the Wallace’s Buick Eight convertible in a snapshot probably taken in 1949.  Those with in depth knowledge of Trudi’s immediate family will notice that the face with the cherubic grin over Trudi’s father’s left shoulder was Photoshopped in, as  younger brother Stephen wasn’t born until 1954.  [Thanks for providing the digitized photo, Stephen!]

 

This goal may strike some of you, dear readers, as -- not to put too fine a point on it -- a bit weird.  But I assure you the low license plate phenomenon is a special thing for many residents of the Bay State.  You may have been unaware as I was that Massachusetts was the  first state to issue license plates thanks to the efforts of Civil War hero, Henry Lee Higginson, who hated “automobilists” whizzing past his front door in Boston and petitioned the legislature relative to licensing automobiles, so speeders could be easily identified and apprehended.  As a result of his efforts, license plate number 1 was issued to a Frederick Tudor in September, 1903 and by the end of the year production had reached plate number 3241.  By the way, plate number 1 is still in use by a member of Mr. Tudor’s family!  Read more

For many years, low number plates were issued, in true Massachusetts fashion,  to those with some political pull.  Wallace family lore doesn’t reveal how or when 777 was obtained, although there is some anecdotal evidence that Trudi’s aunt Margie received her low number as a sixteenth birthday present through her grandmother’s petition to the governor back in the 1930’s.  

In 1987, then governor Michael Dukakis ended this admittedly unfair method of distributing low number plates to those with influence by instituting an annual lottery which continues to this day.  In 2011, 161  plates including  67, T7 and Y11 were distributed to lottery winners from a pool of 6,000 applicants.

To bring  a long - but I hope not too boring - story to a close, cousin Laurie kindly agreed to part with 777 (he also owns plate number 1515 which he inherited from his step mother).  And so, we journeyed to the RMV in Lowell  to meet with him and effect the exchange of plates.  We needed to prepare a stack of papers in advance, including a notarized statement  from a third party  attesting to the fact that Trudi was who she claimed to be.   Apparently,  the state tries to make this transfer process discouragingly complex in order to  retrieve as many  of these low number plates as it can to feed them back into the revenue-producing lottery. 

Here you can see Trudi proudly displaying her new (old) license plate.  It feels right to us to have 777 back.  It looks quite good on her Subaru, and you can rest assured that when we are no longer driving, we’ll pass it on to the next generation.

 Namaste.