Again, Kansas Trivia

"Kansas won the award for the most beautiful license plate for the wheat plate design issued in 1981." The El Dorado Times, January 29, 2009, Page 1B.

First, let's do something about this awkwardly worded sentence. How about changing it to: Kansas won the most beautiful license plate award for its 1981 wheat design. There, that's better: 12 words versus 18 words. Now, let's learn more about this feat, thanks to the Internet.

A Web page containing the History of Kansas License Plates is provided by the Kansas Department of Revenue which issues our car tags. There is no mention of a 1981 award for the Kansas license plate design. If such an award was made, you would think the Department of Revenue would know about it. There are several possible reasons for this ommission: (1)they refer to the 1981 plate as displaying wheat "stocks" and the 1995 plate as displaying wheat "stalks", which indicates fallibility, (2) they don't respect the party giving the award as a legitimate judge of license plate quality, or (3) they aren't up on Kansas trivia for Web page purposes. Regarding reason (1) above, a Wichita State University student or alumnus would probably prefer wheat "shock", but technically a shock of grain refers to sheaves stacked upright in the field. My guess is that the 1981 plate reference to a "stock" is a misplaced homonym. But, I digress.

I found that Kansas won first place in a license plate design contest in the United States and Canada with its depiction of the buffalo -- the iconic symbol of the Great Plains -- in 1995, by virtue of the Automobile License Plate Collectors Association Inc. voting the state's "Home on the Range" personalized vehicle license plate the best in those countries, according to Michael Naughton, president of ALPCA. Naughton presented the award to Carmen Alldritt, director of vehicles at the Kansas Department of Revenue. ALPCA has about 3,000 members from the U.S. and 19 other countries. The Automobile License Plate Collectors Association, founded 1954, is an organization dedicated to the promotion of license plate collecting and research, the exchange of information and plates, as well as all fraternal benefits of sharing a common hobby interest with others throughout the world. It has issued awards for the best plates in North America since 1970.

In Wikipedia's ALPCA site there is a table showing Plate of the Year Award winners since it was first made in 1970. Kansas is shown as winning the award in 1980, the first year of a plate design showing gold wheat stalks on a blue background, and again in 1994 when the wheat design was used again. So, the trivia statement at the top of this post is not untrue. It is merely in error. Let's change that sentence to read, "Kansas won the most beautiful license plate award for its 1980 wheat design." Somebody tell DOR.