,
on the first day that Virginia expanded the vanity plates to 7 digits,
I've always been entertained by the sheer number of other Hokie plates
on the road--vastly outnumbering those of any other school. Then
one day while returning from a football game in Blacksburg, after being
struck by the originality of numerous Hokie vanity plates on the road that
day, I became inspired. I decided to start collecting photographs
of Hokie plates to assemble into a collage that would show a representative
slice of Hokie pride. I started collecting the pictures in October
'96, with the original thought of getting 50 to 75 Hokie plate pictures
over a period of a couple months for my project. But a wise man once
said "Anything worth doing is going to take longer than you think."
Boy, did that guy know what he was talking about.
More than two years, 222 pictures, and about 1000 hours of work later, the collage is finished! Interspersed between the license plate photos, are miscellaneous Va. Tech buttons, football ticket stubs, and headlines of significant Hokie victories, thus the title: "Licensed to Win". And since ceasing to add additional plates to the collage (so I could proceed with final assembly and printing), my total collection has reached about 300 pictures (as of Feb. 1999), and is still growing. If you have a Hokie vanity plate, let me know about it.
After the first 3 months, I had what I originally thought would be a good number of plates for the collage, but there were many plates I didn't have that I knew were out there somewhere (e.g., HOKIE, HOKIES, TECH, VA TECH, VPI, etc.). So I enlisted the assistance of the DMV to help me locate some of the more "special" plates.
The DMV would not tell me who the plates belonged to, but I convinced
them to forward letters to the owners (for a fee of course) leaving the
owners the option to contact me if they so chose. Of the 24 plates
I asked (paid) them to trace for me, I eventually got pictures of 18 of
them. Not a bad response, although I'm not sure all the letters were
even delivered--perhaps the DMV chose not to contact the owner of BOOAHOO
for instance. Two of the plates I requested to be traced had not
issued, one of which we now have on our maroon
van: 
.
The more pictures I got, the more amazed I became at the originality
displayed by Hokie fans trying to come up with a plate that wasn't already
taken. So I wanted to collect even more to show this originality.
For example, did you know that there are at least 16 ways to spell "Hokies"?
There are several other "themes" that became apparent that I also wanted
to bring out with more plates, as you can see in the collage.