For decades, Claude Arthur Stuart Hamrick helped Silicon Valley rake in money during the heyday of a tech boom. He was a patent lawyer who hobnobbed with Apple co-creator Steve Wozniak, served on San Jose’s Rotary club, and ran a golf club featuring local business elite.
But around town, Hamrick’s most visible claim to fame was his license plate, emblazoned with the word “CASH,” which was not only his initials and nickname but a testament to his flashy lifestyle.
“Every time I traded cars, the dealers tried to buy it from me. Every car dealer in San Jose wanted that plate,” said Hamrick, 83. “I told them I wouldn’t sell it for a million dollars.”
Now, 50 years later, Hamrick has changed his mind. The rights to “CASH,” the plate he kept registered in his name since 1970 — the first year California permitted so-called “vanity” plates — is up for sale.
The price? A cool $2 million.
Hamrick’s offer is part of a new, largely untested market of people looking to sell the rights to custom plates in California. Similar license plate exchanges have popped up in Delaware, which has a long tradition of wealthy people affixing rare low-numbered plates to their cars. The rights to Delaware’s No. 6 plate sold for $675,000 in 2008. Texas also runs online auctions for license plates where the phrase “12THMAN” — referring to adoring student fans of Texas A&M football — sold for $115,000.
But curiously, in the nation’s unofficial capital of car culture, there’s no established second-hand market for all of those coveted word and number combinations that Californians manage to squeeze into the confines of a plate’s seven-character limit. That’s where Michael Modecki comes in. He’s spent tens of thousands of dollars amassing the rights to license plates that seem especially attuned to a 21st-century culture of fast money and fast cars: GO VIRAL, EPICWIN and BETTING are among his collection. He is also helping Hamrick advertise the “CASH” plate.
Modecki has been on a social media blitz promoting his plates as the ultimate nonessential purchase for a flashy mogul or celebrity. One plate “MM” is billed as extra valuable because there are only 35 possible plates with two repeating characters — California does not have single character plates — and only 12, including MM, that are “aesthetically symmetrical.” He is asking $24 million for “MM” — and there have been no major offers. Maybe that’s because Marilyn Monroe is no longer with us, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell calls Kentucky home.
How does Modecki justify multimillion-dollar valuations? “If I had billions of dollars, would I spend the money on that plate? And the answer is always ‘Yes,’” said Modecki. “Because it is something that no one else can have.”
The lack of interest so far has not discouraged him. It will take time, he said, for the wealthy to realize they can throw vast sums of money at license plates alongside their Ferraris and yachts. “It’s like buying domain names back in 1996. … Do you think the guy that bought fb.com knew that Facebook would have been a thing in 15 years?”
A license plate market — which allows owners to sell the rights to cherished plates or horde plates in a speculative gamble — takes advantage of the California DMV’s fine print. The DMV’s REG 17 form allows vanity plate owners to “release interest to new owner” of their plate configuration. That clause opens the door for trading these plates on a second-hand market, said Modecki.
Asked about Modecki’s vanity plate sales, the DMV said it “is legal to transfer ownership of most special interest license plates in California.”
Hamrick’s CASH plate spans the more than 50-year history of personal license plates in California. The state’s first vanity plates — NO SMOG and AMIGO — were issued in 1970 after Gov. Ronald Reagan established the program, creating a funding source for environmental protection programs.
It didn’t take long for vanity plates to become not only an outlet for the clever, juvenile and braggadocious in California, but also a testing ground for First Amendment rights, said Jeff Minard, who wrote a book about the state’s vanity plate history.
“License plates started to become public popular culture. It’s kind of like a new set of Nikes,” he said.
In the early days, the DMV had relatively little oversight of plate configurations besides banning overtly explicit words. One memorable plate was “TIHS HO.”
“Nobody noticed it, except when you read it in the rearview mirror when the car is behind you,” said Minard. But the DMV’s move to clamp down on plates deemed offensive sparked a decades-long back and forth over the rights of the state to restrict what car owners want to put on their plates. As recently as 2020, a federal judge in Oakland ruled that the DMV can’t ban some vanity plates considered “offensive to good taste and decency.” The ruling overturned DMV bans on a gay Oakland man using the word “QUEER” and a fan of the rock band Slayer using “SLAAYRR.”
Over the years a small group of license plate aficionados has exchanged small sums of money for the rights to plates in California. “We just didn’t do it publicly,” said Minard. But he said the latest attempt to monetize California’s plates might fall flat.
“There’s this insanity, that money grows on trees, you just have to find the right tree,” he said.
As of January, there are 1,123,008 “special interest plates” in circulation, which include typical vanity plates and other plate designs paying homage to everything from Yosemite to firefighters. The state generated $56.8 million in 2022 from these plate sales.
Another issue impeding a flourishing license plate market is secrecy. License plate owners’ information is kept under lock and key by the DMV after the notorious 1989 murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer in Los Angeles. The assailant found Schaeffer’s home address through the DMV, sparking tighter regulation of license plate data. That means locating a license plate owner requires spotting the plate in the wild and knocking on her window or embarking on an advertising campaign.
Hamrick, aka CASH, left Silicon Valley years ago to live closer to his grandchildren in North Carolina. But he is hoping for one last payday on the back of his years spent in the Bay Area. His daughter-in-law Kristen Staggs is helping with the license plate campaign and now the pair just need to find someone with a love of all things CASH — and deep pockets to match.
“There’s somebody out there that has been waiting for something like this,” said Staggs. “I feel it in my bones.”
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