Before the thousands of vehicles. Before the movie cars, rare classics and automotive collections from around the world. Before there was an Orlando Auto Museum. There was a 1949 Plymouth.

Today, Mr. Dezer is known for assembling one of the world’s largest private automotive collections. Walk through the Orlando Auto Museum and that passion is difficult to miss. The collection stretches across automotive eras and continents, from American classics and European automobiles to microcars, motorcycles, movie vehicles and some genuinely unusual pieces of automotive history. The newest featured exhibit at the Orlando Auto Museum at Dezerland Park Orlando, Dezer’s First Love, takes visitors back to where Michael Dezer’s lifelong passion for automobiles began.

But long before the collection grew to that scale, there was one old Plymouth and a young man in Israel who wanted a car of his own.

Michael Dezer’s automotive story didn’t actually begin with a car. Growing up in Israel, one of his first vehicles was a Vespa, followed by a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. For a young enthusiast, they offered freedom and mobility, but his parents weren’t nearly as enthusiastic about seeing their son riding motorcycles.

Dezer has recalled that when he returned home during his time in the Israeli military, his parents offered him a proposition: sell the Vespa and Harley, and they would lend him the remaining money he needed to buy a car. Dezer agreed, and at just 18 years old, he found the Plymouth that would change everything.

It was a 1949 Plymouth that had belonged to a doctor, and according to Dezer, it wasn’t exactly a pristine collector car waiting to be preserved. It was in rough shape. That didn’t discourage him. Dezer took the Plymouth and transformed it into what he later described as one of the nicest hot rods in Israel. For anyone who grew up around American cars of the 1940s and ’50s, it’s easy to understand some of the attraction.

The 1949 model year represented a significant moment for Plymouth. America’s automakers were finally moving beyond warmed-over prewar designs and into a new generation of postwar automobiles. Plymouth’s redesigned models arrived with conservative styling compared with some competitors, but they were sturdy, practical American cars built for a country entering a dramatically different automotive era.

Today, they’re reminders of a period when American car ownership was expanding, highways were changing the country and Detroit was preparing for one of the most memorable decades in automotive design.

For Michael Dezer, though, the significance was much simpler. It was his car, and he loved it.

The story could have ended there. Instead, the Plymouth became connected to another major turning point in Dezer’s life. In 1962, Michael Dezer immigrated to the United States. To help pay for his passage to New York, he sold his beloved 1949 Plymouth.

He arrived in America as a young man and attended night school while beginning to build a new life. He worked in advertising, entered the typesetting business and eventually moved into real estate, founding Dezer Properties in 1970. But automobiles never disappeared from the story.

In fact, shortly after arriving in New York, Dezer found himself back behind the wheel of something remarkably familiar. He bought a 1950 Plymouth. From there came other cars. Then another. And another. Years later, Dezer would joke about the collecting habit as something of a disease. What began casually eventually grew into dozens of automobiles, then dedicated storage space, then entire collections.

By the 1980s, his collecting had begun expanding substantially. And he didn’t simply chase whatever the collector-car market considered fashionable. He bought what interested him. American convertibles from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s became particular favorites. Studebakers caught his attention. So did microcars, European automobiles, movie vehicles and unusual machines that many collectors might have overlooked.

That philosophy ‘buy what you love’ would eventually help create an automotive collection unlike almost any other.

There is something fitting about walking through the Orlando Auto Museum knowing that its roots can be traced back to a worn 1949 Plymouth. The scale today is almost difficult to reconcile with that beginning. The Dezer Car Collection expanded beyond the cars Michael Dezer had personally accumulated into major collections acquired from other enthusiasts.

Eventually, the collection found a public home in South Florida before making the move to Orlando and becoming the Orlando Auto Museum at Dezerland Park. Today, visitors can walk from one automotive world into another. That’s part of what makes the museum unusual. It isn’t built around a single manufacturer, decade or definition of what makes an automobile important.

A car can matter because it is rare. It can matter because of its engineering. It can matter because of its place in popular culture. Or it can matter simply because someone loved it. And that’s where the Plymouth comes back into the story.

Introducing “Dezer’s First Love”

The Orlando Auto Museum’s new Dezer’s First Love exhibit brings the story full circle. Rather than focusing on the most exotic, expensive or famous cars in Michael Dezer’s collection, the room celebrates the automobile that helped start his passion in the first place.

The exhibit features multiple 1949 Plymouth models, giving visitors an opportunity to step back into the automotive world that first captured his imagination. For longtime car enthusiasts, we hope the room brings back memories of an era when cars like these were still part of everyday American life.

Perhaps you remember seeing Plymouths parked along neighborhood streets. Maybe your parents or grandparents owned one. Maybe your own automotive obsession began with an aging Ford, Chevrolet, Plymouth or Studebaker that wasn’t particularly valuable at the time, but became priceless in your memory.

That’s what makes Dezer’s First Love different from simply displaying another group of classic cars. It’s a collection about the reason people become collectors. Most enthusiasts can name a car that started something. The first car they owned, the car they learned to drive, or the one sitting in a neighbor’s driveway they couldn’t stop staring at. Or the car they sold decades ago and still wish they had back, the project they probably shouldn’t have bought.

For Michael Dezer, that car was a 1949 Plymouth. Today, he owns 15 of them.

There is a natural temptation in the collector-car world to focus on numbers: production totals, horsepower, auction values and rarity. Those details matter. They’re part of what makes automotive history fascinating. But they aren’t usually why someone falls in love with cars in the first place. That happens somewhere else.

It happens when an engine starts. When a teenager gets the keys for the first time. When someone takes apart something that isn’t running and figures out how to make it run again. Or, in this case, when an 18-year-old found a rough 1949 Plymouth that had belonged to a doctor and saw what it could become. Decades later, that enthusiasm has grown into an impressive automotive collection spanning thousands of vehicles and countless chapters of motoring history.

The new Dezer’s First Love exhibit is now featured inside the Orlando Auto Museum at Dezerland Park Orlando, alongside the museum’s extensive collection of classic, historic, unusual and screen-connected vehicles. Whether you remember automobiles like the 1949 Plymouth from the road, grew up working on American classics or simply want to discover the story behind one of the world’s largest private automotive collections, the exhibit offers something a little different: A chance to see where it all began.

Because before a collection can reach thousands of vehicles, there has to be a first love. And for Michael Dezer, more than six decades later, he still hasn’t forgotten his, the 1949 Plymouth.