Even though Jimmy Fox can’t recall precisely why he got interested in license plates as a little kid in Cleveland Heights, he has turned that interest into a storehouse of knowledge about the world, a publishing effort and a business. Part of his drive is curiosity. Part is being linked to some 5,000 like-minded hobbyists. Part of it is connecting with all kinds of people in all kinds of positions in many places, including some countries that don’t even exist anymore. Part of it is affection for history, politics and geography – subjects he disdained at Heights High.
Now the former James Gang drummer and group founder is working on a book tentatively titled License Plates of the World.
Plates of the World will be a sequel to his definitive License Plates of the United States. Fox sold 17,000 copies of the latter through various printings; he has only his working copy. Buy it new for $138.95, or used, for $103 to more than $1,000, at Amazon. It sold for $29.95 in its 1993 debut.
Over the years, Fox accumulated some 30,000 plates; the number’s considerably down, now that he’s shed “the dupes and the junk that sat around in the garage,” he tells me during a recent meeting at the Phoenix Coffeehouse in South Euclid.
The rarest are “generally from countries that no longer exist or from current countries with little population,” Fox says. “There’s an island in the Atlantic called Tristan da Cunha (a singularly remote outpost of the British Empire). I don’t think they’ve had a hundred cars in their history, so getting a plate from there is a little tough. I talked the government out of one and traded for some others. As of the ‘90s, there were only 36 plates issued.”
Fox has one from the Sovereign Order of Malta, a religious order with a building. “How about a country without land that also has a representative at the United Nations? And at the Vatican? It’s called SMOM, and it has a building in Rome right next to the Spanish Steps. I’ve been there, of course; you can look through the gate and see the cars. I made a trade with a German collector. In fact, I traded him a Vatican plate to get the damn thing. You have to know somebody important to get one of those.”
He has plates from Katanga, a breakaway province of the Belgian Congo, and Ciskei and Bophuthatswana, former South African Bantustans, or homelands set up under apartheid.
“One thing a country can do to establish legitimacy is issue stamps, currency and coins – and license plates,” Fox says. “So even though Katanga was never recognized by the world community, they did issue their own plates and stamps and coins, which is why I feel compelled to include it. The Bantustans were a way of disposing minorities into their own countries within the borders of South Africa. They were nothing but geographical designations on a map.”
He has Albanian plates, impossible to get until the breakup of the Eastern Bloc in the early ‘90s. He has celebrity plates from the car of Richard Nixon when he was vice president, and from the car of former FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover.
His favorite? Now there’s a shaggy dog story.
Thirty years ago, a friend in Massachusetts sent him the photo of a plate for help determining its provenance. The plate was porcelain, in red, white and black, with the number C811 repeated in some kind of Arabic. Fox asked whether the friend would trade; he said no, he reserved his best stuff for another hobbyist. Five years later, the third guy contacted Fox, who swapped a Kentucky porcelain from 1913 for the coveted C811; the guy needed the Kentucky to upgrade his collection.
“The original collector writes me five years after that and says, quick, send me $14 immediately. After knowing the guy 20 years, and having met him face to face, and knowing he’s the leading researcher of automotive literature in the world, I sent him the $14 and thought, this’ll be good. Back comes a little package with a magazine in it. The magazine is the October 1914 issue of the Ford Times, the in-house organ of Ford Motor Co. No note, just the book. I leaf through the book, and in the middle, with photographs from 1914, is an article on motoring at the Great Pyramid and a picture of a Model T Ford parked at the base with a plate just like mine with a number 200 higher.
“What does that tell you? It tells you first of all there’s a pretty good chance the plate’s from Egypt, and what does C stand for? Cairo. It’s the 811th plate ever issued in Cairo.” Fox figures the date was 1911 or 1912, and “it’s certainly the oldest plate in the Arab world ever found. I wrote Bob back and said, man, you’re something. When I put that book together, I’ll put that picture from Ford Times in the book.”
With permission from Ford, of course.
