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    Super Moderator LarrBeard's Avatar
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    Ham's '48 -Once upon a Time ...

    Back in the early 1970’s when the truck and I had to work for a living; I had to go between several different facilities on a day-to-day basis. Every facility had a different parking arrangement for hourly, salaried and visitor parking and every category had a specific color and design of sticker so the pecking order was observed.

    If you arrived in the middle of a work day, visitor parking was usually full, salaried was full and any empty hourly parking was always way out Beyond Furthest Egypt (BFE). As a result I usually parked wherever I could find a slot and didn’t worry about what sticker went where.

    As a result of my flagrant disregard for rules, I got a lot of “Parking Violation Notifications (PVN)” from the Security Office. If you drove a 1963 Chevy, the Security Office had to chase down a license plate through the local police and that took a lot of time. But if you drove a 1948 Jeep Truck they knew it was Beardsley (again) and exactly who needed to be notified of the offense. They would send my boss a notice about the PVN and he would scold me. My attitude was that if I had to go to some other facility to take care of a crisis, I wasn’t going to wander all over the lot forever just to find a parking place – I had work to do.

    After several rounds of this, my boss called the Security Office and told them to issue me every parking sticker in the book – he was tired of answering PVN citations. The clerk said that couldn’t be done. My boss then called the Director of Plant Security (a gentleman who had spent 19 months as a German POW and who had a really good sense of what mattered and what didn’t) who said “Give him the stickers”. When the truck retired, it had four or five stickers on the windshield and mirror. But – I still got PVN’s if I parked in a Visitor Space!

    In the 35-year barn storage, the decals disintegrated but the one plastic sticker survived (the one that is shaped as a green circle). Recently a retired plant guard found a stash of old parking stickers (decals) and he offered them to us old guys. If I remember correctly, the red decal was a Plant 3 Salaried sticker. I will put these two stickers on the upper left passenger windshield – right behind the mirror. This adds just another period correct touch that Fort Wayne natives will recognize.

    Now, if I could just find a 1976 Indiana Safety Inspection sticker ….
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