Indignant Ambassador

"The New York World's Fair will produce the greatest boom in the history of the State. . . . Surely every automobile owner and driver in the State of New York should welcome the opportunity to act as an ambassador of good-will for the Empire State."

Thus debonair, voluble Grover Whalen, Manhattan's perennial greeter and president of the Fair, last year sold New York's

Governor Herbert H. Lehman the idea of stamping along the bottom of all 1938 automobile license plates the phrase NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR 1939. Other States had done the same sort of thing. VACATIONLAND was once stamped on Maine's plates. South Carolina motorists advertised THE IODINE PRODUCTS STATE. Californians carried the talisman THE GOLDEN STATE. In the New York Legislature the necessary bill was unanimously passed and "World's Fair'' plates were issued. But for a fortnight, fastidious New York car-owners, bolting on new plates, have wondered. That they should be asked to make peripatetic billboards of their cars to carry free advertising for what is partly private enterprise was to some no more than a high piece of cheekiness; to others it was downright invasion of their constitutional rights.

The New Yorker fulminated tiredly, but the first person to do anything about the plates was a 42-year-old unemployed boiler mechanic of White Plains, one Martin McBohin, a Wartime Marine sergeant. Last week Martin McBohin stuck adhesive tape over the offensive lettering and was promptly arrested for defacing a license plate. Sure that he was standing on his rights, Objector McBohin, up for trial this week, roundly declared: "I'm prepared to appeal the case to the highest court." Indignantly he added: "Next thing you know the State will compel us to advertise someone's corn flakes." More serious to traffic experts was the fact that in order to get the "World's Fair" lettering on the new plates, license numbers had to be made 23% smaller than those of last year.

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