By Suzanne Hodgson
Staff Writer

If customs agents stop you at the border and say you can’t enter the country because of a souvenir in your backpack, most people would leave the souvenir behind.
Tim Stentiford is not most people.
In 1994, on a backpacking trip through South America he was stopped crossing into Paraguay from Brasil because of a few license plates. Stentiford, 48, had carried those license plates for more than four weeks after obtaining them for a man in a “bad neighborhood” of Buenos Aires. On the border, he held his ground against the agents and now proudly displays those plates in Kennebunk home.
Those license plates – tins as they’re known to collectors – are only a small part in his 5,000-piece collection he plans to display in the museum he hopes to open next spring.
The museum, tentatively called Motorific would not just display old license plates, but “show them as a vehicle to tell the story of the 20th century,” said Stentiford, intending a pun. He plans to use license plates to teach interactive geography and history lessons at the museum. Stentiford is even considering an authentic drive-in movie theater that shows old commercials and TV shows of the “Leave it to Beaver” era.
Stentiford, the editor of “PLATES magazine” has spent most of his life collecting license plates from around the country and the world.
His obsession began with his grandfather, Charles Maxfield, who took Stentiford around the world on his armchair through the pages of National Geographic. He instilled a love of travel the boy would never outgrow and lead to a collection boasting one license plate from every country in the world – including the ones smuggled across Paraguay’s border.
When license plates were issued once a year, according to Stentiford, New Englanders nailed old plates to a garage or barn and keep them for years. When Maxfield retired in 1972, he passed on his old license plates to his grandson.
Stentiford knows his history. He casually ticks off license plate-related facts and figures: the first license plate ever commissioned was in Paris in 1893; Maine got its first plates in 1905; the rarest license plate is an Alaskan plate from 1921.
The last fact holds special significance for Stentiford.
Valued at around $60,000, the Alaskan plate is so rare because Alaska was not a state at the time. The only way to get a car in Alaska was to ship it by boat from Seattle, which took more than a week. Alaska had very limited drivable roads, which gave residents little reason to even own a car at the time.
Stentiford used to own the “holy grail” Alaskan plate. In 2000, Stentiford was checking his e-mail when another Automobile License Plate Collectors Association member sent out an email saying part of a rare collection was available, including the Alaskan Plate.
Stentiford jumped at the chance and the next night, met up with the man at the Wendy’s parking lot in Biddeford and exchanged $40,000 for the one plate. The transaction was described in a 2008 Forbes magazine article about the license plate trade.
“We sat on the pavement for the world’s most famous license plate transaction,” said Stentiford, “ I offered to buy him a Biggie shake afterward; he said no.”
Stentiford recently sold the plate to a collector in Tennessee and warily sent it through the mail. Stentiford said after tightly packing the valuable and putting on “every conceivable insurance and tracking,” he and the other collector meticulously tracked the package’s movement for two days. Then it mysteriously disappeared.
“It was 48 hours of sheer panic,” said Stentiford. The package later showed up on the man’s doorstep, but he swore to Stentiford he would never take that risk again.
The Tennessee collector sought the plate to compete a run of all 50 states. A run is one license plate from every year a state has issued them. Stentiford says he can count on one hand the people who have reached a run in all 50 states.
“The Smithsonian doesn’t even have that,” he said. With only four Alaskan 1921 plates known to exist, demand can drive prices to astronomical levels.
In 2007 Stentiford completed his run of a license plate from every country in the world with a license plate from East Timor. He’s worked toward that goal since 1974, when he found his first international license plate, from Okinawa, Japan, and nailed to a garage door in Ipswich, Mass.
Since then he has traveled all over the world looking for license plates, including a trip to Rwanda.
“In Rwanda I learned from the survivors that license plates played a key role in the genocide,” said Stentiford. In the war between the Tutsis and Hutus, numbers from the green and white plates were read over the radio as a way to target members of the Tutsi tribe. After the war, the country changed its flag and its license plates because, “they said it was a ‘symbol of our shame,’” said Stentiford.
After the trip, Stentiford wrote an article for his magazine and was able to raise money for Rwanda.
License plates also help tell the history of Maine. In 1936, during the Great Depression, a state senator from Kennebunkport came up with the idea for the license plate logo “Vacationland” as a way to attract tourist to Maine. The logo is now the longest in use and oldest license plate logo in the country, but at the time Maine officials were concerned the plate would cause outsiders to think improperly of Maine’s women.
“Maine’s got to step it up a notch as far as license plate design,” said Stentifold, who is currently looking at nominees for the license plate design of the year.
Every year since 1970, the Automobile License Plate Collectors Association holds a best of the year award, and Maine has never won.
“It was first runner-up when the Chickadee plate first appeared,” said Stentifold. That plate first appeared June 1, 1999, after parts of the state thought the lobster plate wasn’t representative of the whole state. Before the new plate design could take effect, the state ran out of inventory of plates and had to issue one of the rarest plates from Maine: the lobster license plate with a raised blue “Vacationland” logo, offered for less than a month.
For more information on license plate collecting and the best license plates of the past go to www.ALPCA.org.

Staff Writer Suzanne Hodgson can be reached at 282-4337, ext. 233.