Historic City Memories: Tags and licenses

Tags and licenses

A trip to the county seat

By Geoff Dobson

The other day I visited the Tax Collector’s office out at the County Seat in order to renew my driver’s license. Before being permitted to enter the inner sanctum of the Tax Collector’s Office, it was necessary to obtain the obligatory number at a window. The window reminded me of either the windows at convenience stores in dangerous parts of some towns or the ones at some movie theatres.

The customer service agent was protected from the customers by what looked like bullet proof glass with the agent connected by a microphone to a speaker looking device embedded in the glass. She very obligingly, gave me an alpha-numeric number and advised me to wait in a seating area until my number was called.

On the wall was a screen which periodically showed the numbers as they were called; like some kind of electronic Bingo board. The Board announced which agent was to be seen. A loudspeaker also called out the number and the agent. Thus, something like “F-45, Agent 12” would be called out and would also be shown on the screen, indicating that whoever had F-45 could then see Agent 12.

It all reminded me somewhat of an old fashioned train station: “Train Number 4 now leaving from Platform Number 2, for Douglas, Lost Springs, Lusk, Van Tassell and Points East, all aboard.” It was an efficient system, impersonal, but it gave me an opportunity while I listened as other person’s numbers were called to contemplate the changes that had been wrought as a result of population growth with regard to the courthouse and automobile license plates.

Some may remember when the courthouse was on Treasury Street before it moved to the Cordova Hotel (now the Casa Monica Hotel) before 1968. The tax collector’s office is not in the present courthouse which is now known as the “Judicial Center.”

When the courthouse was on Treasury or in the Cordova Hotel, all of county government except the Road Department and the jail fit within it. Within the Courthouse were all of the Constitutional Officers including the Sheriff, the tax collector, the property appraiser, the supervisor of elections, the superintendent of education, the clerk of the Circuit Court, and the County Commissioners.

Everyone personally knew all of the constitutional officers. Now, most of the county officers have their own separate buildings now. The supervisor of elections is over in the former potato chip factory, the property appraiser and the tax collector in a separate building behind the Judicial Center, and behind that in yet a third building are the Planning and Building Departments. The County Commissioners have their own building on a separate side street. The Utility and Recreation Departments are also in their own buildings. There are numerous branch libraries, not just the one which was formerly located in the Edmund Kirby-Smith House on Hospital Street.

The separate buildings eliminate the necessity of going through the ubiquitous magnetometers that now guard the entrance to the Judicial Center. There was a time, when there were no magnetometers and indeed one did not even lock one’s own doors. Actually, it was only about five years ago, that the writer finally started locking his house, but that was after the family’s old Wyoming cowdog (who looked like a wolf) went to doggie heaven.

Indeed, in the old courthouse, keys to the courthouse were issued to the local lawyers so that they could get in the county law library on weekends. The growth of County Government is not all the result of population growth. Much of it has been mandated by Tallahassee.

The present system generally eliminates long lines that used to occur prior to 1977 when all license plates expired at the end of the year and when one had to go in person to renew the plates. The writer remembers one time in another county when after he had waited for the better part of an hour to buy a license plate beginning with number 9, the office closed for lunch.

Ultimately after a short wait, my number and the agent I was to see appeared on the bingo board. Once inside, the agent was very pleasant and appeared to recognize certain amounts of absurdity dreamed up by the solons in Washington and Tallahassee in the process for renewing the driver’s license. I brought with me, various forms of identification required, including a passport, utility bills, deed to the house, proof of homestead exemption and various proofs showing my social security number. The absurdity was that my Medicare card issued by the government showing the SS number is not acceptable, nor, I was advised, is a military ID card, but my W-2 issued by my own business is.

I asked, only half facetiously, on proof of home address, what do they do for someone who resides under the SR 312 Bridge. I was told they send a deputy sheriff out to confirm the residence or they show the homeless shelter as the place of residence. I sympathize with Dennis for having to be in charge with of all of this process.

As I viewed the various specialty license plates one may purchase, my thoughts turned to the license plates. There was a time before 1986 and the adoption of “Alpha-numeric” license plates, when one could tell the county someone was from merely by the number of their license plate. It did, however, require that one remember the number of all 67 counties in the State from number 1, Dade County; number 9 Escambia County; to number 67, Liberty County.

It made for a good game. In those days, the name of the county was not imprinted on the bottom of the plate. The bottom of the plate bore the legend “Sunshine State” except in 1951 when the slogan “Keep Florida Green” was imprinted. The slogan only lasted a year. It led to all kind of jokes relating to support of tourism.

The first numbers on the plate before the hyphen indicated the number of the county based on its population in 1938. Dade County, of course, was number 1. Duval County was number 2. If the same system were used today based on the population as of the last census in 2000, Duval would have fallen to number 7. Regardless, however, of changes in the census between 1938 and 1977, the number of the county did not change. Although St. Johns County fell in comparative rank (as of the 2000 census, we ranked 29th) the number remained the same, 20.

Indeed, the license plate number would also tell us the weight of the car. Someone with a Packard might have a “WW” license plate indicating that the vehicle weighed more than 4,500 lbs. while a Crosley “Hotshot” would have a “T” license plate indicating that it weighed under 2,000 lbs. A DeSoto might have a “W” license plate (3,500 to 4,500 lbs.) while a Studebaker had a plain plate (2000 to 3,500 lbs.). A Hillman Minx might have a “D” plate (2000 and 2,500 lbs.)

The alpha-numeric numbers were instituted when they ran out of room on Broward County license plates. There simply was not enough room to print 10 WW- and then the number of the plate.
Although some states still continue with a system of numbering the counties on the license plates (the front of the writer’s Jeep has an old license plate from another state bearing “13-8583.” The “13” indicates Converse County. But generally, the game of identifying counties by license plate number has disappeared just as has the Crosley Hotshot, the Hillman Minx, the DeSoto, and the Packard.

Geoff Dobson, a St Augustine resident for the past 33 years, is a western and Florida history writer and was former General Counsel for the Florida Department of Transportation. He is a former president of the St. Augustine Historical Society and a regular contributor of nostalgic memories to Historic City News. Before his parents moved to Florida, his father was a Black Angus cattleman. Geoff has written extensively on Wyoming history (“Wyoming Tales and Trails”). When Geoff was in high school, his family lived in the cattle country of eastern Sarasota County. The family spread, which his parents called “Wild Cat Slough,” was reachable only by a pair of ruts over the sand hills and through a snake and gator infested slough. Now, it is an area of four-lane roads, expensive subdivisions, shopping centers, and office parks. . His undergraduate degree is in history. Geoff received his post-graduate degree from the University of Florida. He may be reached at horse.creek.cowboy@gmail.com