Great Lakes Tour – Day 14

WHERE: Frankenmuth -> Chesterfield (Stahl’s Automotive Museum) -> Dearborn, Michigan

WEATHER: Warm, sunny with scattered clouds, Low 60’s

We get up, have breakfast and leave by 8:30 to go to the private car collection – Stahl’s. It is in the suburbs of Detroit. Bob offers to be the leader again today. We make it by 11:15, and the tour was just beginning. They have antique musical instruments as well as cars.

We start in the music room. It is amazing that all but one of their instruments work/play and the guide plays most of them for us.

  • Big disk at the bottom comes up and plays kind of like a juke box.
  • Crank organ – you really get a work out playing it.
  • Beautiful player piano
  • Note the paper at top is the music instead of a roll, but it has never torn or jammed!

I found the following two instruments very interesting, they play violins as well as the piano.

  • Violins & piano
  • Three vertical violins
  • This model had two horizontal violins
  • Mills DeLuxe Violano-Virtuoso, Circa 1924

They also have numerous BIG pipe organs.

  • 1500 Pipe Wurlitzer Theater Organ

Then we go into the room with his show cars!

  • 1911 FORD
  • “It’s a Deusey!”
  • Speedster
  • Here’s My Speed!

Model A’s in the showroom. I am partial to my Jim’s Model A pickup at home. He and Rick spent many hours together building it from ground up.

I thought this was funny. I found this tag hanging off the throttle lever in the Model A Pickup. No other car needed instructions on how to start the car! It reminded me of my Jim again when he was only in elementary school and went on a field trip to Harrahs Automobile Museum and the curator offered the kids to try to start a Model A. Jim said I will, and hopped up and started it, much to the curator’s surprise!

They fed us a box lunch while we listened to the pipe organ music. I was reminded of my childhood by their BOB’s BIG BOY restaurant. It was a special treat to go there when I was a kid.

  • Rick’s favorite car – The Tucker
  • The most expensive car in the collection
  • The Tucker Emblem
  • Award Winner!
This is as close as we will come to driving an antique car this trip, oh well we are having fun!

We leave the Auto Museum and head for Dearborn. We are the leaders of the pack this time. The traffic is picking up and trying to follow directions on the phone and keep us together as a group is getting harder but we all make it. Rick is summoned to help work on Steve Kurtz’s car and I do the blog. The next two days we get a reprieve from driving in the Detroit area and will be taken around on a bus.