The St. Patrick’s Day staples: excessive celebration, marathon Guinness consumption, talking like a Leprechaun, full-on embraces of stereotypes, and green applied to everything. Everything, including license plates.

People who love the color green and who are also passionate about it being on their license plates (surely a huge group), would have found a satisfying home in the aptly-named Evergreen State for most of the 20th century. Deep green backgrounds appeared on Washington license plates in 1921, 1926, 1929, 1931, 1933, 1939, 1941, 1943, and from 1954 to 1962. Even in most of the off-years, the numbers were green even if the background wasn’t (for those keeping track: 1927, 1930, 1932, 1934, 1940, 1942, ,1944 through 1953, and 1963 until 1986). That’s a lot of green!

A notable exception was 1928, a year that lived in infamy for one state senator bursting with St. Patrick’s Day pride and armed with a paintbrush.

Washington’s 1928 license plate colors were an anomaly that broke an emerging pattern of color schemes that changed annually from white-on-green and green-on-white.

For 1928, the state skipped the normal colors and chose a Halloween-appropriate black on orange.

Orange, it so happens, matters on St. Patrick’s Day: “Wearing orange on St. Patrick’s Day isn’t inherently offensive, but in Ireland and Northern Ireland, it can be seen as a political or religious statement. While green represents St. Patrick and Irish nationalism, orange is tied to Protestant heritage and unionism. Outside Ireland, it’s rarely an issue, but in some areas, it may not be well received,” according to Wearing Orange on St. Patrick’s Day (An Irishman’s Guide). One of those areas where it was not well received was in at least one household in Seattle, Washington.

Washington State Senator W.W. “Billy” Conner, evidently of Irish Catholic descent and quite dedicated to it in all matters automotive, took offense from the orange license plate on his car that St. Patrick’s day and rectified the matter by painting it green.

He promptly landed in a Seattle jail as a result.

Conner was quickly bailed out by friends that accompanied him to the police station. These “fellow members of the bar” that swore to defend him could reasonably be assumed to be drinking buddies given the context of the holiday, but apparently were from the legal bar (in more than one sense, this being the Prohibition era). Everyone of course would be shocked, shocked, if any contraband beer had been consumed on St. Patrick’s Day.

Other newspaper articles published the same day noted that Senator Conner had attended the swearing-in ceremony for Seattle’s new mayor, Frank Edwards, that very afternoon, presumably with the criminally-altered license plates on his car at the time.

The Luck of the Irish triumphed in this little episode: no lasting consequences befell Senator Conner, and he and every other proud Irish person in Washington could rest easy the following year, with a beautiful forest green returning to their bumpers.