During a recent foray into the annals of my personal hunting and fishing history, I noticed that my outdoor scrapbooks were looking a little neglected. For around 30 years I’ve collected all my expired hunting and fishing permits and other special tags. Many were neatly arranged in my scrapbook, but the pages from the past 10 years or so had been largely ignored.

It wasn’t that I had stopped collecting the permits. They were all there, although the more recent ones were just laying loosely in a pile in a Rubbermaid container and not proudly displayed in the memory book. So what changed?

Why hadn’t I been placing the permits from the last decade or so into my scrapbook? At first I shrugged it off to the fact that I just hadn’t found time to organize them, but that just wasn’t the truth.

As I browsed through the pages of my scrapbook which held trout tags from the late 70s and permits from as far back as the early 80s, I suddenly realized why I had lost interest in my collection. The modern yellow adhesive permits were just boring to look at and lacked the character of their early counterparts.

Those who have hunted and fished for as long or longer than I can recall going to get their permits, which prior to the mid 1990s were completed by hand and not a computer. Every year the pre-printed permits would come in a different color. Sometimes even the shape or look of the permit would be special, like the 1987 permit that honored the 50th anniversary of the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC).

It was in 1996 that technology caught up with the conservation department and a more efficient system was put into place called the “point of sale” system. From then until the start of this decade, permits were simply printed by a computer terminal onto a slip that more closely resembled a cash register receipt than a hunting or fishing permit.

It was during the 1996 transition period that MDC also decided to change the dates permits were valid. Up until this time permits were valid from Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, but the new permits were not made available until February and weren’t valid until March 1, a system which has continued to the present.

This change threw many hunters and anglers for a loop as their 1995 permit said it expired at the end of the year. Thousands of people thought they had to purchase a special permit to get them through until the new cash register style permits became valid in March. This, of course, was not the case, as MDC had already approved an extension on the ’95 permits to cover the gap and also gave hunters and anglers a free two months of hunting and fishing.

These cash register style permits held on until the turn of the millennium, when the modern yellow computer printouts that we use today were put into action. The new permits helped make the system even more efficient and also served a dual purpose. With the additional advent of the Telecheck system, the new adhesive type permits could also be used as transportation tags for deer and turkey. That eliminated the old plastic ring-type tags issued at check stations.

I guess I can’t complain too much. These modern permits allow hunters and anglers to purchase any type of permit, including deer and turkey tags, at any time during the year without sending paper applications through the mail.

The new automated system has also speeded the issuing process (at least until the computers go down).

While I’m all for modern technology and pretty much anything that improves efficiency, I’ll have to admit, gone are the days of admiring past permits and tags for their character and originality. On the bright side, while my scrapbook may not be as exciting as it was prior to 1996, the permit improvements have drastically changed the convenience of buying and using modern permits.