Video by Eric Keith

Watch your step, Merrill Steeb advises, and it seems like good counsel.

He leads the way into a deep bay where old vehicles sit bumper to bumper. Items on the floor demand some careful stepping, including a collection of glass shards from a salvaged window, double-paned.

Beyond the MG Midget, beyond the flat-fendered Jeep, the St. Joseph man arrives at the rear wall and throws back a covering. Beneath is a 1956 BMW, manufactured in Munich and without a speck of rust. Its distinguishing feature, apart from the curvy exterior, is a single door that opens to the front, refrigerator-style.

Mr. Steeb won’t part with the car, has promised it to his daughter, so his recitation of the BMW’s features contains no wistfulness. Of other things in this private warehouse, he talks with relish of their disposal.

“Everything I ever sold, I wanted back,” he says. “I don’t feel like I have to own it anymore.”

His 84 years have earned the man numerous descriptions: Marine, lawyer, judge, renovator, landlord, car collector. He bought the building at Eighth and Olive streets two decades ago, filled the side lot with Volkswagens and filled the interior with stuff.

Lots of stuff.

An armoire here, an ice chest there, plenty of spare auto parts.

The Volkswagens went away some time ago, roughly 100 of them gone in a single sale. For no particular reason, Mr. Steeb now wants the building cleared, or at least wants movement in that direction.

Some agreeable kin and a big Dumpster help.

“You’re witnessing the end of it,” he says.

Born in 1924, son of a German immigrant, Mr. Steeb went to St. Joseph schools and joined the Marines at age 17. The Corps trained him and sent him to the Pacific Theatre. He spent nine months in Samoa, six in Guadalcanal. At Tarawa, Mr. Steeb survived a horrendous amphibious landing. When the Japanese shot him on Saipan, he got his second Purple Heart and a ticket stateside.

“When three-and-a-half years had gone by, I came home,” he says. “I came home hospitalized, but I got here anyway.”

He joined five others as the first group of World War II veterans to enroll in St. Joseph Junior College. Mr. Steeb would continue his education at the University of Kansas, where he got a law degree.

For 20 years, he practiced in the Corby Building. It proved an agreeable profession, but restlessness set in. “Perhaps you shouldn’t say drudgery,” Mr. Steeb says, “but after 20 years, the law business gets a little bit old.”

The man started buying houses and fixing them up for rentals and eventual sales. Evenings would find him installing a shower or setting tile. Houses came to him with assorted furniture and left-behind miscellany. Once he bought a house just for the pole barn behind it; it became a place for storage.

In 1974, the lawyer moved to the bench, serving two years as magistrate and two terms as circuit judge. “I couldn’t stand deadbeats, and I went after people who wrote bad checks,” he recalls.

Years of working in parking-stressed Downtown increased his natural affection for small cars. He drove a Renault Dauphine and a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. His retirement in 1988 never really took hold, and the purchase of the Eighth Street property gave him license to feed his car habit.

His rule of acquisition went like this: If he had to go look at a Volkswagen, he’d give $50 for it. If a person drove the car to him, he’d give $100.

Mr. Steeb never fancied himself a salesman. When a person sought one of his VWs as a “good, economical car,” he responded, “Why don’t you get a Nissan or a Toyota?”

It was something to do. The enterprise was never meant to be a money-making proposition. “Unfortunately,” he says, “it turned out that way.”

The veteran went for years to Marine gatherings but now seldom does. He points to a board covered with obituary clippings, most of men who served. “I’ve outlived everybody,” he says. “I’m not morbid about it, it’s just that there’s no point in my going to reunions anymore.”

Not that Mr. Steeb feels any urgency to tie up the loose ends of this warehouse. His recollections come briskly, and he walks at a quick pace through the passages of this inventory.

If the volume daunts him, the man doesn’t show it. Mr. Steeb seems prepared for the question: Could he not bear to part with some of this stuff before now?

Laden shelves around him, the man smiles. “Well,” he says, “that’s what it looks like.”

Ken Newton can be reached at kenn@npgco.com.