For what it’s worth
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For what it’s worth

Jun 29, 2023

By Jim Studer

On the road to Cedar Rapids for Twins minor league baseball, I saw green acres of corn. When I saw the Kernels play, I noted only one future Twin, Tanner Schobel, a hard hitting infielder.

While on the road I practiced my usual driving pastime, spotting license plates from out of state. If I didn’t count Iowa, I-35, US-18 and 218 produced only a few more plates than solid Twins prospects.

My lifelong fascination of out of state car identification may be due to seeing the many plates, most old Minnesota ones, nailed to an inside wall of Grandpa Klescz’s garage. During my grade school days I collected miniature plates from US states packed inside cereal boxes; Wheaties, I think. I have always loved geography.

Years ago on vacation I found and recorded these treasures. Today I count the plates on the road to and from St. Cloud, I-94. On a good day I can bag 12-25. As expected, North Dakota leads the pack by far with Wisconsin and Iowa a distant second and third. I wonder if a qualifying factor for obtaining North Dakota plates is a promise to be seen on the I-94 corridor to the Twin Cities a few times a year.

It’s getting more difficult to spot out of staters. Car dealers seem, more and more, to frame the plates with ads bearing their dealership names. Making discoveries more challenging is so many states changing colors of the plates more regularly. For a while it seemed that many states went to a white background making it harder to differentiate the states. So many plates look much the same today; the blue, yellow, green, and maroon has mostly turned to white or black.

More recently a method of enriching state coffers is voluntary taxation. Vanity plates inflate state funds and the egos of the recipients. Then there’s the special revenue plates for specific programs such as that found in Minnesota for the DNR. Some states now offer vehicle owners the privilege of flashing plates that show support of a sports team. Iowans are able to get plates the color of the University of Iowa or of Iowa state. I have yet to see UNI plates.

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