Passion 4 PL8S

Kimberley McGee

Tuesday, March 14, 2000 | 9:42 a.m.

What: Nevada International License Plate Society Convention.

When: 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday; 7:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday.

Where: Henderson Convention Center, 200 S. Water St.

Cost: $20 walk-in fee.

Information: Call JP Richau, 655-6846.

A few are long and yellow and have traveled from far off places.

Others are heavy black steel with faded white letters.

Some are new. Some are old.

There's even one shaped like a grizzly bear.

The varied colors, shapes, sizes and creations make license plates a unique collectors item to Las Vegan JP Richau.

"It's the most pleasurable hobby there is because it's very exciting," Richau said. "We recover history by saving these license plates."

Thousands of thin, metal plates will be showcased at the sixth annual Nevada International License Plate Society convention, which begins Thursday at the Henderson Convention Center.

More than 200 collectors form this tight-knit group of license plate hobbyists who buy, sell and trade the numbered metal plates for nostalgia. They respect the often overlooked everyday items.

License plates were not designed to be a collectible, they just happened to arouse the interest of people who saw more than just numbers on various plates.

The latest popular plates represent worthy causes such as the environment, endangered animals and politics. Part of the extra fee for the special plates go to the particular cause.

Nevada has special plates for Lake Tahoe restoration, Reno and UNLV, as well as those for prisoner-of-war veterans and Purple Heart recipients.

The trend began in the 1980s after the NASA Challenger space shuttle exploded and a license plate commemorating the astronauts who were killed in the tragedy was created.

Other states jumped on the trend when they realized that people were going to pay more just to drive around with special license plates. Massachusetts has the Cape Cod and Islands plate, as well as a save-the-whales plate, which has reportedly been requested by 40,000 caring motorists.

Then there are those that cause controversy, such as New Hampshire's slogan, "Live free or die." The Supreme Court ruled that the slogan was not offensive and if a motorist didn't like it they could cover the slogan on their own plate with tape.

License plates can be used to communicate, but some drivers don't like what the 10-by-4-inch tags have to say. Florida has a right-to-life plate currently putting some drivers into a different kind of road rage.

Richau has collected more than 9,000 plates from around the world, some interesting, some plain, but all respected in their own way by the passionate plate pundit.

"They fascinate me because they represent my love of travel and this segment of automobilia," Richau said. "Some people collect the whole car. I just want the license plate."

Hung neatly in rows on three on Richau's living room walls are license plates from nearly every state. What makes these particular plates from his collection unique is that the 30 or so on the wall have his last name spelled out.

Getting his name on plates from Alaska to Wyoming has not been an easy task.

"I didn't live in all of these states," he said. "I had help."

Friends and other collectors have registered their own cars in their home states with Richau's name as their vanity. He has returned the favor by, for instance, buying a license plate under 2N2R4 (Two and Two Are Four) for a math teacher in the Midwest.

Then there are other ways of feeding his hobby. The state of Utah sent Richau a plate sporting his last name for a nominal $3 fee.

Sometimes it takes a bit more work and license plate collectors are well known for their cleverness in retrieving the plates they want. "It gets in your blood," Richau said. "It's an obsession, or so our wives say."

Getting a yellow and blue 1985 California plate took some serious sleuthing by Richau, who had a friend who worked for a certain state department that just happens to register cars. Richau had to get the plate.

"Someone had my name on their plate and I wanted to contact them," Richau explained.

With good intentions, Richau obtained the address of the plate's owner and wrote a nice letter explaining his automotive addiction.

The owner of the plates said it was a coincidence -- his Richau was a combination of he and his wife's first names. But he understood Richau's plight and turned over the vanity plate after Richau paid for a new one.

In his two decades of collecting, Richau has spent hours in unfamiliar police stations obtaining official plates. He's picked through empty lots and junk yards with fellow collectors during business and pleasure trips around the world.

"It's the camaraderie that is a big part of it," Richau said. "You get to know these people and share a lot in common. It's like a little club, a family."

Each plate in Richau's collection has its own story, which is a large part of the collecting attraction, he said. "Every one of these plates, I could tell you a 30-minute story about them. I had to work for every one of them."

One plate has eluded Richau -- so far. He has written the owner to plead his case. He received a nice letter back, even a signed picture, but then-president of Costa Rica, Jose Maria Figueres Olsen, declined to turn over his presidential plate, which is coveted in the collector's world.

It would seem that Nevadans are just as attached to their plates.

In 1997 a bill was discussed to take all of the blue plates with white lettering off the streets and replace them with the current white with a bighorn sheep and mountains shadowed in the background.

"There was an uproar," Richau said. "They wanted to keep their plates." It was an identity issue. "These people want to be identified as natives and their plates show that," he said.

Thank goodness for some change, though. Nevada has a distinguished rare plate. The 1989 yellow-and-purple miner, 125-year anniversary commemorative plate was discontinued after one year. It is now worth nearly $100.

The real treasures are the random finds of letter and number combinations that mean something, such as a name, a birth date or anniversary. An anniversary date with the initials of husband and wife stamped on a used plate is a spectacular find.

Chuck Damerow is a firefighter in Tucson, Ariz., and a member of the Automobile License Plate Collectors Association (ALPCA). He has collected plates from every state dating from the year he was born.

"I spent four or five years collecting 1950 plates from around the country," Damerow said.

But he didn't stop there. As a firefighter, he also has an ongoing obsession of collecting plates from fire trucks to add to his 3,000-plate collection.

His next goal is to gather one plate from every state in Mexico. "I have a long way to go, though," he said, sighing. "I only have 10 so far, and there are 32 states in Mexico."

Damerow has had the penchant for plates since his grandfather decorated his garage walls with steel plates dating to the early 1900s. "They are old, colorful, and have the date on them so you know how old it is," he said.

He is constantly collecting by trade, purchase and just plain ol' luck. He once stumbled upon a shanty in the desert and found a hidden treasure -- the shingled roof was made of well-preserved old license plates.

Dave Lincoln of southeast Pennsylvania, also a member of ALPCA, started his collection as a boy looking for adventure and license plates in his small town.

"When I was a kid, we had free rein to go where we wanted to go," Lincoln said. "It was common to wander the streets. It was a different era."

In the '50s car owners received new plates every year. he said, which made the number of discarded plates abundant. "They just seemed too good to throw away," Lincoln said. "They are real treasures. They are totally impractical and they turn up in the most unusual places, from behind walls, anywhere. Anybody can make a rare find."

One plate led to another and now he has a barn stacked full of thick metal plates -- some sentimental, some classic, some just plain old plates nobody wanted.

License plates are something people see everyday that has a legitimate purpose, Lincoln said, but they have become more than that to some, "And that's the essence of collecting.

"It's partly a rescue mission," he said. "License plates for a long time did not have good press. They were considered quasi-illegal and scrap metal."

The Department of Motor Vehicles asks that license plates be returned or destroyed when no longer in use, for legal reasons. "They are trying to prevent petty crime," he said. "They are pretty nasty about it in Nevada. Bureaucrats."

Lincoln said that there are ways that collectors get around turning in license plates, such as crumpling aluminum material and saying it was squashed or just saying they lost them.

"There are so many plates needed in states now," he said.

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