Wilbrod Lévi Archambeault, my maternal “pépère" (that's informal French for grandfather), died 40 years ago this month, three days before my wedding day.
I dearly loved pépère, who was born in Québec. There, he married my soft-spoken grandmother, Albertine Marie Rose Laliberté, in 1917. By 1919, the couple had settled in New England, first in Connecticut, and then in Massachusetts. The Bay State is where pépère and mémère lived for the rest of their lives, she until 1981 and he until 1986.
I have two especially cherished possessions that belonged to pépère. One is his pocket watch, which, amazingly, still keeps good time. The other is this license plate, which has a tale (or perhaps a tail) to tell.
A New York Times story several years ago headlined “The Great, Fishy Massachusetts License Plate Fiasco of 1928” reported that the plate was controversial in its day. The state's cod fishery declined from 1920 to 1940, and the 1928 plate's design made already grumpy fishermen even grumpier. They were irritated because the fish, which was supposed to represent a cod, looked more like a guppy. Adding insult to injury, the tiny fellow was swimming away from the state name rather than toward it.
The design was changed in 1929: a bigger, more cod-like fish and a relocation of the state abbreviation from the lower right corner to the lower left. (That second change -- switching the placement of the year and the state's abbreviation -- reportedly was an annual practice in Massachusetts back then, to discourage motorists from faking registration by repainting outdated plates to match the color of new plates.)
I’m sure my no-nonsense grandparents, who had four children by 1928, couldn’t have cared less about this dust-up. And neither do I, really. What matters to me is that whenever my eyes fall on that plate, which hangs in our house, my thoughts always turn to pépère and mémère. They are warm thoughts, but a bit sad as well.
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