BUCYRUS – Mike Burger has a Stingray with a story.
A 1967 Corvette Stingray polished to perfection. Chrome side exhausts, a 435 horse power engine. A classic sports car in every sense. He’s been tooling around in it for more than 50 years now, but . . . exactly 50 years ago, it almost went up in flames.
“That kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” said Burger, who purchased the car from Ken Smith Chevrolet in Bucyrus on Feb. 14, 1969, just weeks before a major fire on April 19 destroyed the longtime dealership on West Rensselear Street. It was the fire of the century, and Burger has black and white photos to prove it.
He plunked down $3,795 for his dream car, which was above the Kelley Blue Book price. At only 24 and, unbeknownst to him, Burger had just bought the car of a lifetime, the pride of the GM fleet in its day. But leery of driving it back to New Washington in the snow and salt, he made arrangements to leave it at the dealership.
Burger came back for it just in time. He was meant to own that Vette.
“On these old cars, you can still buy every piece. There’s probably 500 parts on that car total,” Burger said after he pulled the midyear model out of the garage. “When I go to car shows, people stand around admiring it. But when I open the hood, that’s when they say, ‘Oh, wow!’”
The black and red Vette, a four-speed with no power steering or power brakes, boasts a 427 cubic inch engine. It has won countless awards at car shows in Columbus, Sandusky and as far away as Chicago. In June, it took Best of Show honors at the annual Cruisin’ With the Cops in Bucyrus.
Burger, a member of the National Corvette Restorers Society, has made it his hobby to restore that car from the get-go. First, he decided to paint it black instead of its original “Marlboro Maroon” color after a fender-bender accident with a pick-up truck just six months after he bought it.
“It needed repainted, so I just started playing around on it,” Burger said. “That right there is when I decided to start painting cars on my own, going to body shops and watching them and the next thing you knew, I was one of those guys doing the work.”
He continued painting cars for friends and relatives over the years, especially after he retired in 2007 from PPG in Crestline, where he worked as a process technician. In 2014, he began a major overhaul of his Vette, lifting the entire body off the frame. The restoration took 2,160 hours and three years to complete.
Burger, 74, said he was thrilled to find the original factory sticker still on the gas tank. He credits longtime friend Bob Shetler for the fiberglass body work, but did all the paint, engine and interior restoration himself, including four coats of PPG single stage black paint.
“It sure was more fun putting it back on than it was taking it off, that’s for sure,” said Burger, who stores his Stingray in a garage out back with a paint booth on the side. “Right now, everything is the way it would have looked coming out of the factory if it was a black car with a red interior.”
Burger and his wife, Suzette, trailered the Stingray to 10 car shows last year where it earned 994 points out of a possible 1,000 at the prestigious NCRS show in Chicago. In June 2018, it came full circle – back on the showroom floor of Mathews Chevrolet in Bucyrus for a car show – and another trophy.
The Burgers own another black Corvette – a 2005 C6 convertible with a black interior that Suzette usually drives. It’s housed in the garage attached to their brick ranch which, not surprisingly, is chock-full of Corvette photos and memorabilia.
But no car is more memorable for Burger than “THE” car. The one with the “4 MB, 67 OHIO” license plates. The one he almost didn’t have.
“For right now, it’ll probably be in this garage for a while,” he said. “It’s not for sale. I just got it done. I definitely gotta’ enjoy it now.”
