When Pamela Johnson Converse drove around California with her personalized plate TNYBBRN on her Ford Explorer, people who saw it were stumped.
“I had one guy who was panhandling on the side of the road and he made me roll down the window,” Pamela said. “What does this say?” he asked. “He thought (the plate name) was cool.”
She had another lady follow her into Starbucks to ask her about the plate thinking it had something to do with bees.
Pamela is a retired nurse who worked for 30 years in the neonatal intensive care units in California after graduating from Mount Royal in Calgary. How it happened is interesting.
She owned a tack store for the hunter jumper horse community in Calgary. Pamela showed hunters working part-time for 15 years at the Calgary Stampede. She looked after the saddle horses and rode in the Opening Grand Entry ceremonies of their rodeos and in the 1988 Summer Olympics.
Pamela had to close the store when the Spruce Meadows Equestrian facility cut into their business. About four months later, her mother suggested Pamela apply to nursing college thinking she would be good at it. Pamela had worked as a veterinarian assistant at the Calgary Zoo and thought about becoming a veterinarian but decided it probably wasn’t something to pursue.
After taking the Canadian nursing exams, she subsequently did the American exams so she could move to California for the warmer climate and because her sister was showing horses there.
“I found out that I loved working with critical babies,” she said. “When you are a nurse, it’s more than just a job. It’s part of you. You are there for the worst moments of those people’s lives and you make a difference. I had several kids for whom I was there for their delivery and cared for several months that I’m still in contact with. Parents send invites to graduation and things like that. They’ve become very good friends. As a NICU nurse, you become the surrogate parent. I spent many, many hours rocking little ones to sleep.”
But why specifically neonatal nursing as opposed to any other unit?
“It’s the size of the diaper, the size of the puke,” she said with a laugh. “The babies just seem so fragile. I grew up on a ranch so I was used to dealing with animals that couldn’t talk and babies need someone to speak for them.
“To get them when they are so tiny and so, so sick, and to be able to hand them off to their parents when they are well enough to go home and they go on to have a great life is what it’s all about. My smallest baby was 385 grams and he’s now 14.
“We didn’t lose that many because we were a very good hospital. But you do lose some and you have to believe they go to a better place. I’m a firm believer in souls that come back. I’ve been through so many deliveries and when the babies come out you can just tell they’ve been here before.”
Pamela chose the TNYBBRN plate because she felt it symbolized her career. Most of her unit colleagues had done something similar.
“I had seen somebody else’s and I thought it was kind of a cute idea,” she said. “One nurse said it got her out of some speeding tickets and I thought, ‘That’s a bonus.’”
When she and husband JC moved to Arizona five years ago, they found TNYBBRN was already taken for that state. The rules required three months to change over the plates, so she chose RNTNYBB for her BMW X3. One person asked if she had been on the New York Broadway show Rent.
JC once had a plate that read Prost 7 because he worked in the food and beverage industry. He has one now on his 1991 Acura NSX race car that reads VALHALL.
“I’m Icelandic and Valhalla was also the name of our ranch,” she said.
Her late mother had a plate on her Mercedes-Benz 560 SL that read AMMA6. AMMA means grandmother in Icelandic and she was the grandmother of six grandchildren.
You could say personal license plates run in the family.
JC and Pamela are members of the NSX Club of America (NSXCA) that is the official Acura/Honda NSX owners club. It is based in North America and has members from around the world. The club was formed in 1988 as a resource for owners, enthusiasts and prospective owners interested in maximizing the enjoyment of the NSX in an organized community setting.
Perry Lefko is the Content Manager of The Car Magazine. He can be reached at [email protected]. Feel free to forward any story suggestions or comments.