Auburn saved itself a place in automotive history

By LEE SAUER

Experts recognize the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum as one of the world's finest historical automobile repositories. It's not difficult to see why.

The building that houses the museum looks as if it were built specifically for its current purpose. Classy and elegant, old but oh-so modern, it hints of containing something enigmatic and of extreme
value.

The whispers are true. Inside, visitors encounter more than old cars. They see six inter-related displays describing the evolution of the automobile age. As with much of history, the explanation is not simple. To the principal force of technological innovation must be added ambition, competition, ego, foresight, greed, miscalculation, subterfuge and talent ­­ in other words, the best and worst of human endeavor.

This is where the magic comes in. Like a match in the dark, one inter-related group of cars embodied the achievement, wonder, triumph, nastiness and pain of the emerging auto age. Then ­­ a moment later ­­ the group's light died. Auburn, Cord and Duesenberg-brand automobiles comprised the group, and the museum building served as the ill-fated family's home. As a result, coursing around and through ACD Museum displays is a bittersweet story of what-might-have-been.

The tragedy could have continued. If the story had been forgotten, if the cars and objects that illustrate it so well had been lost, history and the City of Auburn would have been unforgivably ill-served.

But the story ends happily. For, through the museum and its continuing efforts, the saga lives on.

***

The fate of the Auburn Automobile Co.'s administration building long sat on a precarious cliff edge.

E.L. Cord ordered the structure built between 1929 and 1930 to house his then-thriving automobile empire. Cord built for the future. Perfectly level floors, scales sunk into the floor, sophisticated machinery for testing everything from window seals to suspension systems, a drafting room with 78 desks, cutting-edge telegraph and teletype systems ­­ all the building's accouterments gave evidence Cord planned on continually producing trend-setting cars into perpetuity.

But, in less than a decade, the company was dead. The beautiful building sat empty.

In June of 1938, an unusual entrepreneur paid $25,000 for Cord's former capstone. Dallas Winslow built a career by buying popular product lines that suffered an early demise. Catering to customers left in the lurch, Winslow used left-over inventory to supply repair services.

Applying this business tactic to automobiles, Winslow hired former Auburn Automobile Co. mechanics and assemblers. When a Cord 810 transmission went on the fritz, for example, the car's owner could get a rebuilt replacement from Winslow. The theory: that owners of Cord's cars would pay to get a few more miles out of their cars.

But a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion. Cord's cars ­­ the Auburns, Cords and Duesenbergs built between 1924 and 1937 ­­ never lost their appeal. In fact, they gained popularity until they cultivated cult-like reverence. To meet demand, Winslow continually added to his line of services. Eventually, owners of the three brand names could get complete restorations done in Winslow's shops.

In 1952, an ad appeared in Motor Trend magazine. It suggested that admirers of Cord's cars organize a club. The idea caught fire. In 1957, the club held its first meeting in Auburn.

The town's Chamber of Commerce sniffed a promotional opportunity. It formed a committee headed by Del Mar Johnson and charged with helping the auto club feel welcome. The fledgling event grew and took the name Auburn Cord Duesenberg Festival.

In 1971, Johnson suggested holding an auction of old cars in conjunction with the festival. A local auctioneer company run by the Kruse family made the most of the idea. Like a locomotive, after a so-so initial year, the auction picked up a full head of steam.

Through an agreement, Kruse gave some of each year's auction proceeds to the festival committee. Soon the chamber's bank account bulged with more than $25,000 in auction money.

Disagreements on how the money should be used followed. Facing a crossroads of changing circumstances, the chamber as a whole couldn't decide how to continue. But festival organizers knew where they wanted to go. Besides, the group had matured. Perhaps it was time to strike out on its own.

In 1973, the committee separated from the Chamber of Commerce and took the name Auburn Cord Duesenberg Festival Inc. Simultaneously, festival organizers formed Auburn Automotive Heritage Inc., and charged this new group with creating a museum.

Talk of acknowledging Auburn's automotive past had been kicked around for years. Some locals thought a glass-encased car on the DeKalb County Courthouse lawn would suffice. Others proposed taking advantage of the traffic zooming along then-new Interstate 69 by putting up a pole barn nearby and filling it with a few cars.

A third historically-minded group wished to reclaim the old administration building and bring the cars back home.

Most of the buildings that made up the sprawling Auburn Automobile Co. complex had already disappeared. The City of Auburn took down the factories when it built the community pool and new street department complex in the early 1960s. By 1973, some in the community felt the administration building should succumb to the same fate.

At the time, the former beauty queen looked like an old hooker. Although Winslow provided invaluable service in keeping Cord's cars alive, he had not been so kind to the automotive man's building. In the elegant main showroom, Winslow installed a machine shop. Heavy lathes had been bolted directly into the fine terrazzo floor.

Then, after Winslow died in 1963, his estate rented the building. The angle of the building's demise increased.

But armed with their new organization and money to boot, historically minded museum organizers gained strength. In January of 1974, their dreams came true: Auburn Automotive Heritage Inc. purchased the administration building for $105,000.

That victory would prove to be a very small battle compared with the larger war of restoration. At the time of the sale, Marshall Clothing, a Butler apparel manufacturer, used a portion of the building as a shipping warehouse, according to John Martin Smith, a former AAH president and driving force in the museum's early days. To the south of the proud stairway in the main showroom, Marshall built a second story, complete with wooden ramp for sliding boxes down to the main floor.

In the north side of the showroom a motorcycle sales and repair shop had taken up residence. Partitions were built between the beautiful pillars to create a showroom in front, said Smith. Behind the wall, museum organizers found a motorcycle repair shop, complete with all the grease and grime that occupation engenders.

But the biggest mess hid behind the showroom.

In his quest to build the perfect working environment, Cord had chosen a horseshoe-shaped building. This allowed each office a bank of windows and brought in natural light. Years later, in his quest for more floor space, Winslow enclosed the courtyard between the horseshoe legs.

When museum organizers first discussed buying the building, a manufacturer of fiberglass campers leased the courtyard room. Just before the sale was complete, fire struck the company. The damage helped push the building's owners into finalizing the sale, but that was little consolation to the buyers. "They got the insurance settlement and we got the work," Smith recalls.

Still, museum organizers believed in their mission. They enlisted a corps of dedicated volunteers who attacked the daunting clean up job with a will.

Once the showroom had been cleared of debris, professionals were called in for the delicate restoration work. To bring frieze decorations back to life, the company used as many as seven restoration artists, each wielding one color, who took up positions on a large scaffolding that was then wheeled around the big room, said Smith.

As the main floor showroom returned to its former glory, the dream took shape. Even opponents began to recognize the building's potential.

On July 6, 1974, the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum officially opened its doors. When the festival returned to town a couple of months later over Labor Day weekend, 15,000 visitors streamed through the museum's doors.