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| A 1928 Massachusetts license plate with a bad omen! |
1928 was a bad year for the Massachusetts codfish
yield. Whose fault was it? The Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles', of course—or you might think
so, to listen to some of the irate fishermen that year.
The problem started with the new license plate design.
At the time, it was common for states to issue brand new license plates every
year, and Massachusetts was no exception. The new plates for 1928
featured something revolutionary, too: it was the first time any state put a
picture of anything on the plate. Since Massachusetts was known for cod,
the picture the RMV chose was, logically, a codfish. It appeared at the
bottom of the plate. In the bottom left-hand corner was the year,
1928. In the bottom right-hand corner was the state, written
“Mass.” And in the middle was the codfish—the first picture of anything that ever appeared on an American license plate. That should make the
fishermen happy, right?
Well, no. Complaints started pouring in from irate
fishermen who were not happy at all. One problem was the codfish
decal. They didn’t like it because, as they complained, it looked more
like a “giant guppy” than a codfish. Worse, it was facing away from the
name of the state, suggesting that the codfish were leaving
Massachusetts! This could have been a strange kind of modern
superstition. More likely it stemmed from raw nerves on the part of the
fishermen, whose nerves were already frayed because the codfish yield had been
down all decade, and this probably just set them off.
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| The 1929 Massachusetts license plate: there, is that better? |
Whatever the reason, this was a problem for the RMV, and
they took action. For the 1929 license plates, the design was
updated. This time, the codfish was represented in more detail, so it
looked more like a real fish. And instead of swimming away from “Mass.”,
it was swimming toward it. Did it help the codfish yield? Not at
all. 1928 and 1929 weren’t good years for cod fisheries, but the 1920s
and 1930s generally weren’t. But the RMV learned its lesson: the 1930
Massachusetts license plates had no fish on them at all!
There’s no record of how the fish felt about the
license plates, but then, fish don’t drive.