THE Final Trustee; Born-again rodder considers it his duty to preserve hot-rod history.(News)(Richard Munz)

Byline: PHIL BERG

Richard Munz

REAL ESTATE DEVELOPER, RETIRED

Several years before real estate developer Richard Munz retired, he had an epiphany. He was a Ferrari guy, who owned a Daytona, a 365 GTB, a 308 and an F40, all of which were important to him because the late Commendatore, Enzo Ferrari, oversaw their design. But Munz also had a few common classic cars and motorcycles, and so he made his annual pilgrimage to the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in 1995. While hobnobbing there, he purchased a 1939 Ford hot-rod coupe, intending to drive it from San Francisco to his home in Madison, Wisconsin, and enter it in Rod & Custom magazine's Americruise rally, where thousands of hot rodders, traveling from six different corners of the country, converge on the wild metropolis of Lincoln, Nebraska.

"That was the moment,'' he explains. "I had such a great time on that drive that I came back and sold all of my Ferraris. Now there's not an import car in this building.'' He's talking about the three-story former service station that he has converted into his private garage. Inside are more than 40 cars and 20 motorcycles. "I exercise them all,'' he says, which is nearly a full-time job. His modern commuter cars are a 2005 Ford GT and a Lightning pickup, driven when Madison spreads salt on its winter roads.

Inside the 1929 structure are service bays for working simultaneously on five cars, and there's a lounge that was created in the space of the former rest rooms. Behind the desk in the office is a wall-sized tapestry of a Ferrari F40, flanked by a portrait of Enzo Ferrari and the Prancing Horse crest. The ceiling is covered with a Ferrari flag. Based on this room, visitors would expect that a Ferrari aficionado resides in the 80-year- old, reinforced-concrete, clear-span building covered in brick siding. But now Munz is a hot-rod guy: "I like cars with stories. I like cars that were honored as the most prominent from hot-rod history.''

Munz was not new to hot rods when he discarded his Ferraris. "My first car was a 1940 Ford coupe,'' he recalls. He lusted after a '40 Mercury convertible as a kid in Council Bluffs, Iowa. "It just had the look,'' he says. "My folks had a friend in '49 who was a Mercury dealer. When he came out of the driveway ...