Swap Meet Saga: Decatur Adventure I

I'm very proud that my grandpa didn't buy anything this meet except license plates. No crappy scooters or golf carts this time. He chatted most of the time with his friend Ivan who had his daughter with him. My grandpa said he has the beginning of Alzheimer's so she came with him to watch out for him and just sat in the truck in one of our spots and read. 

My major battle this swap meet was with the motor home. Me and this RV had some issues with each other. I emptied a bottle of that blue septic deodorizer down the potty right off when I got in here and I am so happy that I did.

This really awesome picture is of the motor home I had such problems with this swap meet.

After we packed up for the night Friday I didn't really have anything to do because it’s really boring and it’s just me and my grandpa trapped together in this place. He made sandwiches and I rearranged the whole damn camper. He kept complaining that he wouldn't be able to find anything anymore but honestly, it’s now all bagged and separated into passenger, truck, farm truck, dealer, vanity, and out of state plates. They are all in order by year and take up half as much space as they did before. 

I cleared off the bed and the bench for my grandpa. I laid down a blanket for him and got him pillows and another blanket and even gave him my second comforter that I brought. I was worried that he was gonna be cold since heat rises and he was sleeping nearer to the floor. He also doesn't have hardly any body fat  on him so he gets cold easily. I crawled up onto the bunk and hit my head and arms and legs a bunch on the ceiling but when I laid down something stabbed me. I pulled an iron vice and a big bag of money out from under the mattress. I was like the princess and the pea, the mafia version. 

I could hardly go to sleep because I was coughing so bad. I figured out it was the dust up there on the bunk and I had to sleep with my face in the pillow just so that I could breathe. I woke up a lot in the night and then in the morning I only woke up when Grandpa cranked the heater up so high I thought I was in a dusty sauna. Then the heater blew the circuit and when I told Grandpa, he just shrugged. I figured out which panel held the circuits and flipped it myself instead.

And of course, I've had the usual experience with my grandpa and his driving. I hate riding in this motor home because every time I think its going to be the last time. That is why I have composed this overly long and detailed blog post, to distract me from my fear of the ride home.






Thus ends my swap meet saga. Read this at my funeral if I die before we reach home please. Thanks.

What is a New Old Stock (NOS) Plate?

I know I use this terminology quite a bit but I just wanted to make sure that everyone knew exactly what I meant when I said "New Old Stock" or NOS plates.

Wikipedia defines NOS as "obsolete equipment, or original parts for obsolete equipment, that have never been sold at retail. The term refers to merchandise being offered for sale which was manufactured long ago but that has never been used. Such merchandise may not be produced anymore, and the new old stock may represent the only current market source of a particular item."


So, new old stock plates are plates that were made the same time as all the other plates of that year but were never issued to be put on a vehicle. A lot of these plates ended up just taking up space in country courthouses for decades. Without exposure to rain or sunlight and never taking the beating that used plates did, these NOS plates are practically new. 

Because my grandfather was so lucky as to get his hands on a lot of these plates, we have long runs of plates (like RRJ*445, RRJ*446, RRJ*447, RRJ*448, ...). Most of our plates also have the original paper still between them. There are a few years where you can find ads for prisoner rodeos on the tan, brittle paper.


When you go to register old plates on a vehicle, the DMV will check them over to make sure they don't have too much rust or holes. they also check to make sure the colors are correct. There is no need to worry about the colors being correct when its the original plate in mint condition.


I think it was easier for me to convince people to buy NOS plates for their cars when the state issued plates were the ugly blue and red plates that were hard to read. Now they are issuing clean black and white plates that look really slick and classic. The only thing that I like better about old plates appearance wise now is that on new plates the numbers and letters aren't raised. It's a quality thing. You can tell that someone made these old plates and that a machine just printed out the new ones.



Maybe I'm just being snobbish (and a little self serving). The state issued classic and antique plates are also ugly with that old buggy in middle of the plate. If you are cruising around in a nice '67 Mustang, you don't need a picture of a Model T on your license plate. You need a plate like this black and white FNH*747 that I have so many pictures of.

I'm having a hard time coming up with interesting things to say about license plates that I can write a full blog post about. If people have questions or comments, that would be great fodder for material.

Until next time,
Kelsey.

I Was 22 Before I Realized Other People Didn't Know What License Plates Smelled Like

That's a really weird thing to know, right? The smell of license plates. But it isn't something that you think about other people knowing or not knowing.

I was working at the Student Store at Oklahoma State University in the supplies area when a bunch of us were opening boxes of supplies that we were supposed to put on the shelves. It was a box of art supplies, I think, that when I cut the tape and that first blast of air hit my face I said, "Wow, that smells like license plates."

It was like I just said that I eat paste or that on weekends I'm a professional polka dancer. My coworkers looked at me like I was insane and I looked at them like I expected them to totally know what I was talking about. They obviously didn't know and I had to backup and tell them that my grandpa sold old license plates. They still looked at me like I was crazy because, selling license plates also isn't very normal.

I'm not sure how he got into it. I've asked but I guess I never really listened to the answer, if he gave me an answer at all. He just did. When it wasn't even popular, my grandpa went around to court houses around Texas and asked if he could have all the unissued plates that they might have lying around. Turns out that they did have lots of plates just taking up valuable space so they just handed them over with a "thank you, sir" and his collection grew and grew. Sometimes, someone he knew would call him up and tell him about an old barn or chicken coop that had a ton on license plates nailed up all over it. He would go out and, with the permission of the owner of course, pull them off, clean them up and add those to his collection as well.

I'm sure (because I have never done an actual count) that my grandpa has over 200,000 license plates in his collection. That's a lot of damn plates. So, as a small child, with nearly a quarter million of those things lying around, I kind of knew what they smelled like. It didn't really process that others wouldn't have had the same education in smells that I did.

What do they smell like? There's a hint of that smell tires have, and there is a bit of a bite of metal that tickles your nose like when you lick a nine volt battery. The NOS plates have paper in between them so they have a really strong smell of old newspaper. A lot of them have a smell like dirt mixed with all the other scents. The plates that we take to swap meets also smell like the plastic sleeves they are in. That smell gets stronger after they have been sitting out in the sun all day long. Those plates also sit in these wooden crates that my grandpa built so they have a little woody or nutty smell layer on top.

All of this is stored somewhere in my brain. They say that smells evoke the strongest memories and I totally agree with that. License plate smell always makes me think of sunshine and oppressive heat. Cold drinks that get hot too quickly. Old men talking about what used to be. Folding lawn chairs with that plastic weave. And especially the motor home. That's what my grandpa would take to swap meets, this old 1980 behemoth of a motor home that refused to die. That has a smell too, kind of like license plates, and swap meets, and dust and sunshine.

Kelsey.

And then God said, let them have a blog!

Hello there! I was sitting around looking at all of the amazing things that we have here at Arthur's Auto Antiques when I thought, yes, a blog is the perfect way to keep in touch with people. It's so much easier than always updating the website (arthursautoantiques.com if you didn't know what the website was).

I also thought that this was the perfect place to talk about some of the things that are important to people who might want to buy our stuff (or people who already have). Hopefully I'll have a lot of stuff to keep me talking about, cars, license plates, models, meetings, and new things on our website.

Maybe I'll even get Arthur on here to write something. He doesn't really like the Internet all that much. That's why I'm the one who's been doing all the posting. I also made the website. And the business cards. And the postcards. Really, all Arthur does is answer the phone. So please give him a call (It really makes his day when he gets to talk to new people!) and ask him about getting a pair of wonderful, original Texas license plates to go on your classic or antique car.

214-543-5562
Arthur

Please don't call after 9 PM though. He might know all there is to know about Texas plates and he has a great catalog of what we've got in his head but he needs his sleep to keep him sharp.

I really hope to keep posting on here about things that will really help our customers and maybe draw in some new people.

Kelsey.