Stickers

Growing up in the far north Chicago suburbs, we all got used to the village sticker being a required part of the annual cost of owning a car. It usually cost $20 or $30 a year and owners had to have one for every vehicle in the household. It added up pretty quick if you had a couple of cars. You needed one to park on the street, or needed one to park outside in your driveway. You needed one, or Johnny Law would issue you a ticket. Heck, Johnny Law might have issued a ticket if you didn't have the current village sticker affixed to your windshield on the first of July minutes after you went to the village hall to buy the new sticker. Ask my Dad about that one...

The refreshing part about the village or city sticker is that it usually got scraped off with a razor and replaced every year with a new one. That meant a unique design, a new color, or something subtly different to spice things up for the next 12 months it clung to your windshield, right?  Of course it helped to clean the pieces of last year's sticker completely off otherwise the new one would bubble & the corners would lift. They also blocked your view. Come to think of it...those damn stickers were a pain!

But what I dig now is a vintage car or truck with a village or city sticker that remains intact to remind us what the designs and hopes of yesterday were. A quick glance at a preserved sticker can hint at a city's vision, and style of a particular era. Here's a few that caught my eye from recent car show travels.

 

What about you guys & gals? Got an old village or city sticker that you never scraped off of your old ride? Share it at doctorsvt@gmail.com

-D