Collector’s secrets: Stories from a Massachusetts license plate expert At one point Stewart Berg had collected 100,000 license plates. Stewart Berg smiles next to only a few boxes from his license plate collection, which is partially stored in a Cambridge warehouse. Courtesy of Stewart Berg. 1 As a little kid in the 70s, Stewart Berg visited the same street in West Roxbury where one house held garage sales every other Saturday morning during the two to three months of summer when the weather stays balmy, and he always sang the same question: “got any old plates?” License plates, that is. “I must have bought like 100 plates from this lady. She was right across from this church on Center Street,” said Berg, a local Massachusetts license plate historian and the state’s preeminent collector. “I just remember not hesitating to go there the first thing every Saturday morning to see what kind of new stuff she had … how she was getting some of the stuff and finding these plates was just beyond me.”