Past Plates Blamed For Scaring Fish, Luring Goats

License plates, from Idaho’s “Famous Potatoes” to Kentucky’s “Bluegrass,” offer fleeting glimpses into a state’s character - or at least its state of mind at a particular time.

Utah boasts of the “Greatest Snow on Earth,” Montana of its famed “Big Sky.” A Louisiana tag was nicknamed the “lipstick plate” because the state’s name is scrawled, graffiti-style, in bright red.

Massachusetts’ infamous codfish plate lasted only one year, 1928, after fishermen blamed it for a miserable season because the fish was depicted swimming away from the state name. The design was altered the following year to make the fish head the other way.

Early plates were made of leather, usually by the local blacksmith. Later, porcelain, steel and brass were used, and state prisons took over the task. To save metal in World War II, some states made plates of a soybean composition. The experiment flopped, lore has it, because goats grew too fond of the new snack.

Today’s plates get into other kinds of trouble. Ohio and North Carolina are feuding over aviation history. For years, North Carolina license tags have declared “First in Flight,” referring to the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Now Ohio, where the Wright brothers grew up, plans a “Birthplace of Aviation” plate this year.

But to watch for a real brouhaha, look to California and Alabama, where legislators are mulling “scarlet letter” proposals that would slap the letters DUI on the plates of motorists convicted of drunken driving.