Don Stenger knows a good finish when he sees one.
After all, that’s what the legendary car detailer did for nearly 40 years in Morgantown as the owner and proprietor of Stenger’s Car Wash & Detail.
You could cruise in, get the winter crud cleansed from your ride, or all the bugs off the windshield and organic offerings from twittering birds excised from the fenders and hood — and then, something else.
The Stenger Treatment: Winking chrome, coal-black tires and a wax job that was just plain three-dimensional, in the diligence of its application.
After such detailing, he noted proudly, some of his clients decided they just might want to drive their car another year — even if it was on the other side of 100,000 miles on the odometer.
That’s because people generally put a lot of stock in their four-wheeled history, as he is also wont to say.
He put some stock in the Civil War history of north-central West Virginia when he spied that reproduction at a yard sale 30 years ago.
“I saw it,” he remembered, “and said, ‘I probably should save that.’”
It was a copy of an etching, lovingly rendered two years after the Civil War, in tribute to the 14th West Virginia Infantry, a crack unit made up soldiers across the region — Monongalia County included — which saw heavy combat during the war that pitted brother against brother.
The Union infantry squad organized at the height of the fighting in 1862 would go on to engage Confederate forces in fierce skirmishes across then-western Virginia for the next three years.
More than 80 enlisted men and seven officers from Monongalia County and other locales were killed in action during those campaigns.
Various illnesses wrought by the tough conditions of war would claim the lives of 157 other enlisted men, along with another officer.
Stenger had the etching parked in his house all those decades. Then, he decided the Morgantown History Museum might make for a better address for the showing.
Last Friday afternoon, he took care of that final detail, without fanfare, when he presented the framed document to the museum on Kirk Street.
Call it a matter of the rearview mirror being just as important as the windshield, the car guy said.
“People will appreciate it here,” Stenger explained.
“We need to know where we’ve been.”
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