‘I just wanted to go big’
Driver hits back after licence plate rejection
SASKATOON • When it comes to celebrating his family name, Dave Assman refuses to take no for an answer. After Saskatchewan Government Insurance (SGI) denied his latest request for an “ASSMAN” vanity licence plate, he had an oversized decal designed to replicate the plate in question and then placed the decal on the tailgate of his white Dodge Ram pickup truck. Assman — pronounced OSS-men — said he appealed SGI’s decision Tuesday and received a message around four hours later that his request had once again been rejected. Then the railroad worker took action.
“I could have got a plate for the front but I really wanted a vanity plate on the back of my truck,” Assman said in a social media post showing off the decal.
“See, I hate to say it but I’m kinda a sarcastic ass and well, I just wanted to go big!” he said later via direct message. In addition to his name, the decal includes the word “Saskatchewan” and the provincial motto “Land of Living Skies.” It even features what looks like the four bolt openings used for attaching to vehicles every licence plate in the province. Assman first tried to put his name on a licence plate in the 1990s. The application was rejected as “profanity.” His recent request was denied on the grounds that it was “offensive, suggestive or not in good taste.”
“I think they are too worried that people are going to have hurt feelings about something that is complete nonsense,” Assman told the National Post by direct message last week. “Even if it wasn’t my last name, who is it going to hurt?”
SGI, like other provincial authorities responsible for vanity plates, refuses any application that has even a whiff of sexuality, drug references, politics or religion. Its list of rejected vanity plates runs to 85 pages. Speaking to the National Post last week, SGI spokesman Tyler McMurchy said the agency generally errs on the side of caution. “Even if a word is someone’s name and pronounced differently than the offensive version, that’s not something that would be apparent to other motorists who will see the plate,” McMurchy said. This is not the first time a Saskatchewan resident named Assman has achieved a sense of prominence.
In the 1990s, a Regina gas station attendant named Dick Assman became a household name after latenight talk show host David Letterman featured him. Dick Assman, whose name was for years emblazoned on a massive sign outside the Petro-Canada gas station where he worked, died in 2016. He was memorialized in The New York Times.