Welcome to Prince Garage

Bob Prince paused while sitting at the kitchen table in his Grafton home.

“Now we’re getting philosophical,” he said when asked why he liked cars.

The 83-year-old has a few classics in his garage, including a 1931 Town of Milwaukee fire truck, an red convertible Austin-Healey he said he “pretty much built from scratch,” a 1957 white Chevrolet Corvette, a 2012 Jaguar and a 1964 Honda CB77 Super Hawk motorcycle.

“Each one has its own personality,” he said.

Prince used to drag race — he almost got run over by a car when he slipped off his motorcycle decades ago — enjoys road trips and collecting a variety of items, including motorized vehicles.

His decades of automobile expertise from enthusiasts and his escapades across the earth made him a logical choice to organize Mel’s Charities’ inaugural car show in Port Washington on Aug. 20. It won’t be Prince’s first.

Years ago, he was invited to a Road America show at the Osthoff Resort in Elkhart Lake.

“I got there and there weren’t enough people to park cars. I’m one to jump in,” he said.

He was later asked to run the show. He had no experience, but he said, “I know about cars and I like talking to people.”

He organized the show for 12 years on the resort’s lawn in front of the lake, creating a setting he said could compete with any car show in the country.

Among the vehicles coming to Mel’s Charities’ show are a rare Healey Silverstone once owned by race car driver Jim Kimberley and a 1931 Cadillac Fayette four-door V16 convertible. Prince said only a few of those were made during the Depression.

Prince is bringing his 1931 fire engine built by Pirsch and Sons in Kenosha that he is working to restore.

“I do my best to find unique and historic cars,” he said. “Hopefully, there’s something there for everybody.”

Prince’s interest in cars was sparked as a youth growing up in Whitefish Bay. He convinced his father Edward, a vice president of Gimbel Bros., to buy a 1953 convertible and allow him to install a dual exhaust system. The engine’s roars in the covered parking garage at the office didn’t exactly thrill Edward’s co-workers, Prince said.

Prince’s passion wasn’t deterred. The only child worked with a couple of neighbor boys on a 1936 Ford roadster with a Chrysler engine sans brakes.

The group got the machine up and running with Prince in the driver’s seat sitting on a box — the car also lacked floor boards. Once it started with a push, Prince had a decision to make.

“Here I am roaring toward this cul-de-sac,” he said.

Prince had to either steer into the yard of a neighbor who owned the gas company or his own garage. He chose his family’s residence and “tapped” the wall, moving the bottom portion out six inches.

In high school, Prince drove to school in a 1950 Triumph Thunderbird — he has a 1953 one displayed in his house as a tribute. He parked it in a friend’s garage so he parents wouldn’t learn of his purchase.

“I was the only one riding a motorcycle to Whitefish Bay High School,” he said.

Despite this, Prince managed to get accepted to Yale, where he majored in history.

Before he graduated from college, Prince’s parents sent him to Europe to visit a friend studying in France, where he and a friend could have hit it big. They passed on purchasing a 1950s Ferrari for $2,500. It could have been worth millions today, depending on its race history, Prince said.

He still managed an adventure. Prince befriended a woman from Turkey and drove a Volkswagen Beetle through Yugoslavia, then the Iron Curtain, to bring her home.

“I like adventure and doing things off the top of my head,” he said.

After graduating from Yale, Prince bought a 1957 Corvette from a vice president of Wisconsin Bank whose wife told him to get rid of it. The car remains one of Prince’s prized possessions.

Prince’s friends went to grad school at Stanford, and he stayed with them in an extra room.

“I drove the Corvette out on Route 66 in 1962,” he said, just like the TV show named after the famous highway. “I did the real deal.”

He took a trip driving up the Pacific Coast while camping alone at night and picked up a Danish girl who was hitchhiking. They had a nice time until Prince was told she was engaged to someone from Harvard — Yale’s heated rival.

“That wasn’t such a good thing,” he said.

In 1968, Prince and his wife stood out while driving through Europe in a new tangerine Porsche. They smuggled in magazines, jeans and records through Checkpoint Charlie to deliver to a friend in East Berlin.

“I could have been jailed,” Prince said.

Prince’s careers included a management position at Sprague Electric in Grafton, then running a lamp factory at a 100-year-old building in Chicago where he worked with impoverished black people and saw people teargassed during protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

“It was really the culmination of my education,” Prince said. “Whitefish Bay was not real world. Hyde Park was integrated.”

During a second stint at Sprague Electric, Prince and a couple of fellow employees started a new company in Fredonia called High Voltage Capacitors. It landed a $1 million contract from a company in Texas that sent people to inspect a tiny plant that wasn’t yet equipped to handle that size of an order.

“We had family and friends ‘running the machines,’” Prince said.

Prince’s company passed that test but ran into yield issues. Parts could only withstand high-voltage tests at the end of the line, and 15% to 20% of them were lost.

Prince got a real estate license and went to work at Mary Lester Fashion Fabrics, which was downsizing, so he ended up closing stores.

Then, he worked for North Milwaukee State Bank, the only black-owned bank in Wisconsin, and helped it find a new location on Fond du Lac Avenue across from the Capital Court mall. He spent eight years as the bank’s consultant.

“I was their token white guy,” he said.

He commuted to Milwaukee from he and his wife’s 1878 fieldstone house on 135 acres in Kiel.

Prince got divorced and in 1981 moved to a three-story house on 12th Avenue and Spring Street in Grafton that a bank had taken over and ordered the garage torn down. He refurbished it, and as a result was given the first chance to buy his present, well-maintained home on 12th Avenue, where he has lived since 1983.

Thanks to commercial real estate investments with his father, Prince retired when he was 50.

Prince’s connections throughout his career led him to volunteer with the Great Circus Parade. He was in charge of all 400 horses for 17 years.

“I’m not a horse person but I got involved with pulling wagons,” he said.

A friend from Hyde Park presented Prince the chance to travel. The family bought an 1896 house on Big Cedar Lake and invited Prince and other friends to fix up a cottage next door. He got to be part of the family and went along on trips to Jamaica, the Philippines and several countries in Africa, including Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Kenya.

Through travel with his parents and other ventures, Prince said he has visited 50 countries.

Prince’s house displays some of his items from his journeys and his love for cars. Collections of toy model cars are parked on multiple shelves occupying entire walls, an old French dining ware set up on a formal dining room table, Chinese items and a room full of armadillos of all kinds. He fell in love with the animal when he came across a stuffed one in Mexico.

“I just thought it was a real crazy cookie,” Prince said.

The Concours Car Show at Coal Dock Park runs from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 20. Food and beverage sales will benefit Mel’s Charities. The Brian Dale Group will perform live music. For questions or to register, email rprince1939@icloud.com or staelensmatt@gmail.com.