A six-year-old David Steckley was supervising as his dad changed the licence plate on the family car.
After removing the 1958 plate to replace it with the 1959 plate – yes, the province used to issue new plates every year – an uncle said to him, ‘You need to save those plates.’
“I thought it was the silliest thing I ever heard,” Steckley said.
But he listened to his uncle, and he kept it. It would be the first of the more than 5,500 plates he has collected over the years, one of the largest collections in Canada.
Steckley has an Ontario plate issued from every year from 1911 to the present day. He has plates made of leather, porcelain, tin and aluminum. A walk through the Acton man's plate collection is like a unique stroll through history. He has a temporary paper licence from 1916, because tin was needed for the war. There’s the 1937 plate, the first stamped with a crown to mark the coronation of King George VI.
There’s the 1943 plate where you can see the stamp of another plate that’s been painted over, because again tin was needed for the war, which led to the reusing of old plates.
There are plates from motorcade vehicles from visits to Ontario by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother and Pope John Paul II.
He has the 1971 licence plate of former Ontario premier John Robarts – he wanted it more for the fact that its number, 1000, indicated it was the first plate issued that year rather than whom it belonged to.
But Steckley’s favourite plate was found early in his collecting days, while still a teenager. He was rummaging through an old barn and found a box of car lights. At the bottom of the box was a small slab of rubber with the number 116 on it.
“I knew I had hit the jackpot,” he said.
It was one of the oldest known licence plates from 1905. And as incredible of a find as it was, it would get better. Steckley would later look up the plate in the motor vehicle registry and find out that it was registered to Benton Neff, inventor of the Neff Steam Buggy, the second car to ever be manufactured in Ontario.
While the rare find really kick-started the collecting bug, he said it was joining the Automobile Licence Plate Collectors Association that really took things to an entirely new level.
“All of a sudden you have a network of collectors,” he said. “You have guys reaching out who want to trade.”
His collection is meticulously organized with the Ontario plates displayed on the wall around his basement, ordered by year. There is a section for sample plates, for personalized plates, for specialty graphic plates. Leaning against the wall are boards organized by province or state. Though he has a few European plates, Steckley focuses mainly on passenger vehicles from Canada, the United States, Mexico and Australia.
“Whatever you’re collecting – coins, stamps – you have to focus on what you’re going to collect,” he said. “There’s just too much out there to think you’re going to get it all. And you have to be knowledgeable about what you’re collecting.”
Steckley said over the years, the hobby has become just as much about the people he has met and the friends he’s made than it is about the plates. And having friends in the hobby pays off.
When Ontario started issuing plates beginning with the letter D, Steckley put his collector friends on notice. If they saw a Service Ontario location issuing plates starting with DAVE, he wanted one. Sure enough, he got word of DAVE plates being issued in Whitby and immediately drove there to get DAVE 111.
But no matter how much his collection grows, there are always plates on his wish list, which currently includes a 1915 temporary plate, a 1962 plate from the Royal tour and a prototype of the Ontario plates that were given to media members at the launch of Ontario’s new, and short-lived, blue plates in 2020.
“It’s something you can immerse yourself in and enjoy on your own, but you can also engage with other collectors,” he said.
For the past 20 years, he’s organized and held a licence plate collector’s show at the Acton Arena every April. It brings together about 100 collectors from across Canada and the United States to swap plates and stories.
His dedication to the hobby earned him entry into the Automobile Licence Plate Collectors Association’s Hall of Fame last year, just the second Canadian to be honoured.
As for the plates that started it all, Steckley said he eventually replaced them with 1958 plates in better condition. He suspects he traded the plates with another collector somewhere along the way.
“They didn’t have the sentimental value that they do today,” he said.
