Can any of us really trust our childhood memories? Can we really be sure that those few images or moments in time that seem to be branded on our brains really existed or happened as we recall them?

One that sticks out in my memory is of an open garage at the end of Leslie Drive, Saanich, BC, two streets over from mine. I often passed the garage in summer when coming and going from the local playground.

What caught my attention then, and what persists as an image in my mind after all these years, is that the far end of the garage and both walls were plastered with license plates. I don’t know how many there were, but they were in sets of two (from the front and back of a vehicle). Even dividing the total number by two would have added up to a lot of years.

As colourful as those plates were, that wasn’t what intrigued me. They were—every one of them—the same number, 7.

This is what I mean about trusting to memory. That’s what I remember, what I can see in my mind’s eye now—but was the single number 7 really what I saw, or am I wearing my tinted glasses? I’m content to live with that mental image, I’m simply advising readers that, well, if you asked me what I was doing last Thursday I’d have to think about it. As for what I saw when I was a kid...

You can blame this week’s Chronicle for triggering this childhood memory, however accurate it may be, most of a lifetime later.

There’s another one related to license plates and as vivid in my mind—I think. The Janeks lived three doors up from us on the same side of the street. As I was passing by one day, I saw old Mr. Janek, the granddad, seated on a milk stool in front of their car, a 1953 Consul. I couldn’t miss it or him, the car was parked right beside the house, facing the road.

In those days, the province alternated license plate colours every two years, simply swapping the background and numbers each year. In other words, the plate shown above with its yellow letters and numbers on a black background would be flipped to black numbers on a yellow background. (Those are the colours that I remember with Mr. Janek, BTW.)

Because that’s precisely was old Mr. Janek was doing. He had a small can of paint in his left hand, a fine artist’s brush in his right. Stiff with age as he sat on his stool, he was painstakingly reversing the colours!

Yes, the expired plate showed the year of issue—but who’d notice? Even a cop in that pre-digital age would normally accept the colour scheme at face value. For the nominal price of two small cans of yellow and black paint, and, say, half an hour of his time (he was retired), Mr. Janek saved the cost of renewing his license plates.

Times and license plates—the entire concept of automobile licensing—have changed dramatically since then, of course. Which makes the stories behind the first BC license plates all the more interesting today.

An interest shown by this week’s guest columnist, the late Ainslie J. Helmcken. He, too, was intrigued by old cars and their original owners. He even knew some of them personally.

One last firsthand story about license plates, this one going back only 20 years or so. While digging for bottles in the old Wakesiah Mine dump, Nanaimo, I was working alongside a Cedar resident who was well-known for his bottle collection and for his luck in finding such things.

Which he proved that summer evening. Right before my eyes—he was only six feet away—he turned up an enamel license plate. It was chipped and rusted but, overall, considering that it had been in the ground for almost a century, in fair condition. 1914, as I recall.

To have been so close yet so far...

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