Gahanna, Ohio meet, April 22, 2006

Barely a week after Verona, before I had even finished organizing my finds and letting the memory cool, Joe Sallmen approached me again about another meet, inquiring if I might be interested in attending. Perhaps knowing that nothing more memorable was going to come my way, I again accepted the offer.

Gahanna, Ohio is a city located just northeast of Columbus. It isn't quite a city as much as a lot of sprawl contained by arbitrary boundaries. We traveled the night before. The trip up there went by well enough, and thankfully the car did not act up to the degree it did last time around either. There was quite a bit of rain, though, and night had fallen by the time we were several counties into Ohio.

The major setbacks didn't occur until we were in town. The host of the meet had not been particularly knowledgeable about local lodging, although Mr. Sallmen expected that we would have no problems getting an inexpensive motel room for the night without reservations. Unfortunately, there were few hotel and motel options available, and each successive place we stopped at had rates much higher (and parking lot layouts more convuluted) than the one before, even ones far away from the Port Columbus International Airport. We eventually ended up at Knights Inn, where we discovered that the entire Morgantown High School basketball team were checking in one at a time in front of us. My dad (who dislikes both travel in general and hotel rates in excess of $20) would have had a heart attack if he had come along. We came very close to acting upon my original suggestion of sleeping overnight in the car. After a frazzled hour or so, we did eventually get an unexceptional room around 11:00 at night.

The meet itself started early the next day, in (what else?) the multipurpose room of a local church. Peace Lutheran Church was much larger, more modern-looking, and more elaborate (with full facilities and an indoor water fountain-like thing) than I had assumed any self-sustaining church could be. (Joe could only theorize how many passes of the collection plate could finance a place like it.)

Attendance was a bit lower than I expected, and only Joe and one other collector had brought enough license plates to fill more than one table. This was not necessarily a disadvantage, since it was easier for me to look through smaller trade stocks, with me feeling more attentive and less pressed for time. One individual had brought along a few route markers and other road signs to the meet. I found an older diamond-shaped Michigan route marker for highway 66 that looked interesting (That's Michigan state highway M-66, not the more famous albeit decommissioned one out west), but unfortunately someone else got to it before me.

A good selection of collectors and individuals were in attendance: Dwight Hedrick, the host; John Northup, and many others. One person brought along many very early Ohio pre-state, porcelain-coated, and flat steel plates that were ostensibly for sale...for a total cost of many thousands of dollars. Although such items were obviously out of my reach, it was interesting being able to see them first-hand...including a small selection of West Virginia plates from the teens on another table that I could only lust over.

I didn't initially find as many plates to add to my collection as I did at either the Annandale or Verona meets. However, I didn't go away empty-handed, and in fact I found a couple great additions to my 1985 "birthyear run:" A pristine license plate from the Canadian province of New Brunswick, and one from the Yukon Territory! The gold prospector graphic has been used on Yukon license plates since 1952, and for many years a dab of gold paint was placed in the pan of each plate by hand, a practice that was still done in 1985.

Representative truck (B) and light trailer (T) plates from my home state. The truck plate was made by the Polyvend Corporation in Arkansas, and has the serial dash in the wrong place.

Finally, an Ohio motorcycle license plate with an August 1985 expiration. It goes nicely with the equivalent car plate I found in Annandale, don't you think?

The donation auction turned out to be lot smaller than that held at the ends of the previous two meets as well. Most of what emerged there was not especially memorable: Older Ohio license plates of various classes that, if not necessarily in bad condition, were too boring for me to take any interest in. I did get a nice lot of highly colorful Wisconsin non-passenger license plates (seen at right), though. At one point they autioned off a whole box of assorted plates like these, all from Wisconsin, and I might have even gotten it if someone else in the audience hadn't wanted them more than I did. At least it provided an interesting afterword for the event.

After the event, we were given the run-around yet again by being directed to a get-together at a CiCi's restaurant that neither existed in the immediate vicinity nor was listed in the phone book. Then we went home.

The Gahanna meet may not have been the biggest or most spectacular hobby-related event I've had the privilege of attending--and we experienced quite a few setbacks before and after the event--but I did enjoy it nevertheless. Compared with Verona, I had an easier time browsing through collectors' selections, there was less rusty junk and, dare I say, the people were nicer.

Even so, three meets in two months have essentially worn me out. I'll be taking a hiatus from hectic hobby activities throughout the summer, but I'll be ready for more next fall.

The Network License Plates The Idle Pen

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©2006 Andrew Turnbull.
Last update April 23, 2006.