The Mystic Cords Of Memory
ONE ENTERS THE OLD PART OF Auburn, Indiana, abruptly, as though passing through a clearly marked curtain of time. After a vale of strip malls and franchise food, the large street trees close in suddenly, shading a rich selection of Victorian, Craftsman, twenties Tudor, and generic Colonial houses, anchored at the center by the limestone and art-glass fortress of the DeKaIb County Courthouse. Perhaps a mile away, down Van Buren Street, where workers’ small cottages mix with old commercial structures, a newer brick factory building stands out from its surroundings. It isn’t its age but the huge gold letters on the tall plate-glass windows that demand attention: AUBURN, CORD , and DUESENBERG , one name per window, repeated again and again around three sides of the first floor.
ABOVE THE FRONT ENTRANCE a large limestone slab proclaims this building to be THE AUBURN AUTOMOBILE CO. This was Auburn’s corporate office, and in this building were created some of the most significant automobiles of the thirties, objects that strongly shaped America’s perception of itself as the country of the future. The Cord models 810 and 812 were born here, and the designs for the Auburn Boattail Speedster were refined here. Down in Indianapolis, 120 miles away, Duesenberg, Inc., another of Errett Lobban Cord’s many transportation companies, was changing the image of driving at its best—even though only 480 of its famed Model J and SJ passenger-car chassis were ever built, an average of 5 per month. These companies are long gone, as are the days when a major automobile manufacturer could fit comfortably in a small town. Today the building enjoys a new life as the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum.
When construction of the building was completed in 1930, many local citizens thought it too lavish, too “big city” for a town of fewer than 5,000 people, since besides containing utilitarian business offices and design and engineering spaces, its public center was the factory showroom. This is still a glorious room, 12,000 square feet of Art Deco splendor. The floor is a rich geometric terrazzo, while a colorful plaster frieze of stylized foliage in greens and ocher, touched with silver leaf, bands the upper walls and columns, almost twenty-two feet overhead. Here, lighted by Italian chandeliers of brushed nickel and opalescent glass, the Auburn Automobile Company presented its creations to the world.
Other Cord Corporation products were displayed as well, demonstrating the deep commitment to automobiles and airplanes that led Time magazine, in a 1932 cover story, to call E. L. Cord “Mercury to the Middle Class.” Cord’s many companies, held under the umbrella of the Cord Corporation, included the Stinson Aircraft Corporation, the Lycoming Manufacturing Company (which made engines for automobiles and aircraft), and American Airways, later to become American Airlines. At one time or another Cord also owned ship lines, taxicab fleets, and even the Checker Cab Manufacturing Corporation.
When Auburn opened its new building, a Lycoming-engined Stinson monoplane occupied the most visible corner of the showroom, with Auburns, L-29 Cords, Duesenbergs, display engines, and other objects of transportation on view. Today the room has been brought back to the 1930s. The Stinson has been replaced with a 1932 Auburn Boattail Speedster, but this is surely the only automobile showroom in the world that continues to show the vehicles that were being manufactured when it was built.
The great plate-glass windows are now filtered to protect these rare automobiles from the sun, and in the soft light one is struck with how perfectly the cars and the architecture complement each other. The powerful lines of the fenders, bumpers, and hoods are echoed in the sinuous detailing of the molded frieze, while the colors of the automobiles, wine red and maroon, deep gray, or paler shades of green or yellow, resonate with the colors in the floor. Seeing these cars in this room is not only a stirring experience but an aesthetic one as well; a visitor could not understand the design environment of the time so successfully in any other place. The showroom is the heart of the museum, which fills all of the 80,000-square-foot building. Its structure and contents stand today in testimony not only to the designs of the past but to the ways that auto manufacturing has changed so dramatically in the ensuing years.
SAVING THE BUILDING WAS A CLOSE call. John Martin Smith, an Auburn attorney and a member of the museum’s board since its inception, traces the museum’s founding in 1974 to events that started two decades earlier. Owners of Auburn, Cord, and Duesenberg automobiles had formed a club, and in the early fifties they began to sponsor an informal Labor Day reunion in which members brought their cars back to Auburn. The town took little notice at first. Over the years the event gradually became more structured, and in 1956 the Auburn Chamber of Commerce created an official Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Festival. The festival’s goal was the creation and support of an Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg museum, but this was only a dream, for there was simply no money to make it happen. Smith, who was secretary of the festival for years, laughs as he remembers that as late as 1971 “our budget was all of four hundred dollars, and that went for mailing expenses.”
Things soon began to change. Another automobile club had sponsored an auction in the East the previous year and done quite well. Smith and others decided to try the idea in Auburn to raise money for the museum. They hired Kruse Auctioneers, a local farmauction firm, to conduct the event. The results of that sale far exceeded expectations and changed a lot of lives. Kruse stopped selling cows and tractors and became Kruse International, the leading auctioneer of fine automobiles, which still makes its headquarters in Auburn. The auction profits suddenly brought the idea of a museum into the realm of possibility, and after another record sale in 1972, planning started in earnest.
MOST OF THE LOCAL FOLKS thought the museum should be put in an inexpensive industrial building at the edge of town, out by the interstate, if it was to attract any visitors at all. Smith and a small group of Auburn citizens disagreed. The old Auburn Automobile Company offices and showroom still stood, and that was where the museum had to be. It was a hard sell, because by the early seventies the building was in sad condition. After the company closed and was liquidated in 1937, the building was taken over by a man who purchased all the parts and inventory of Cord’s three marques, along with parts from a number of other bankrupt automobile companies—Graham, Franklin, and Hupmobile, even the inventories of defunct tractor makers—and moved them all into the building. They filled every corner. E. L. Cord’s office became a storage area, and the great showroom was converted into a machine shop, with milling machines and lathes bolted into its beautiful floor.
The Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Company, as it was known, stayed in Auburn until 1960, offering parts and service, including complete auto restoration. The name and inventory were then sold to Glenn Pray, who manufactured a Cord 810/812 replicar in Oklahoma through the early seventies. The old building began to fill up with a mix of low-rent tenants. One manufactured padded outdoor sports clothing, another serviced motorcycles, and the center courtyard, which had been roofed over in the forties, was eventually occupied by a small firm making fiberglass camper tops. The showroom was stripped, and the wonderful light fixtures were carried away by souvenir hunters. Many of the second-floor office windows were bricked up. The roof had begun to leak and had never been repaired. But John Martin Smith and his allies saw beyond the deterioration. “We have to save this building” was heard again and again in Auburn in the early seventies.
Almost all the buildings of the autoassembly plant, located behind the office building, had been demolished in 1962, when the last occupants moved out and the city took over the site for a municipal swimming pool. If this building was not saved, the final vestige of Auburn’s auto heritage would vanish, a great loss for a town that at one time had seen ten carmakers building thirteen marques. Even as an A-C-D Festival committee negotiated to buy the building, a fire struck the camper-top maker, burning most of the courtyard roof and filling the structure with acrid, greasy smoke.
Finally, supported by community donations, the preservationists bought the building in January 1974 for slightly more than $100,000. Another campaign began immediately, this one to bring the showroom back to life as the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum. Restoration of this single room cost more than the purchase of the building. The terrazzo floor was carefully patched and polished. A mezzanine that had been used to store clothing was removed. A team of artisans from Chicago restored the colorful frieze. Word went out that the new museum was looking for the original light fixtures, and slowly they reappeared. About half were recovered; the others were precisely replicated.
AT FIRST THE MUSEUM USED only the showroom. Many of the tenants elsewhere remained, and their rents helped finance the fledgling institution. It didn’t own a single car when it opened to the public on July 6, 1974; all twenty-four autos on view were borrowed. One by one the tenants were evicted, as the museum needed more space, until finally it occupied the entire building. However, restoration of the space and reorganization and interpretation of the collection are still very much in process.
The museum has had only three directors. It is currently headed by Robert Sbarge, who came from a maritime museum in Connecticut. He says that while his two predecessors were “car men,” he is a “museum man”—“although I’m fast becoming both.” Under Sbarge the museum is now addressing its original mandate to collect and interpret automobiles in six specific areas. The first of these, of course, is the Auburn, Cord, and Duesenberg cars of the E. L. Cord era, the glorious years between 1926 and 1937. This is the part of the collection exhibited in the showroom.
Auburn automobiles had been manufactured since 1903, starting as an outgrowth of the Eckhart Carriage Company, one of many such firms in northern Indiana, of which Studebaker was the most famous and longest-lived. The region had long been a center for the construction of farm wagons and carriages, chiefly because of the availability of skilled (often German) craftsmen and good hardwood. With the advent of the horseless carriage, a number of companies turned into carmakers, including Auburn. At first it was owned and managed by two sons of the founder of the original carriage works; they sold out to absentee owners in 1919. The new management paid little attention to the barely profitable company, and by 1924 Auburn was in deep trouble. It’s said that one member of Auburn’s board of directors wouldn’t even own one, and that in the process of buying a new Moon automobile, he stumbled upon Moon’s crack salesman, E. L. Cord.
Cord, it turned out, was tired of selling cars but eager to manufacture them. The Auburn board, desperate for anything that might save the company, made him vice president and general manager. He was a prodigy, just thirty at the time, a fast and profane talker afraid of nothing and no one. Cord said that he would take no salary, but he wanted 20 percent of the then nonexistent profits and options to buy stock. After disposing of the glut of unsold cars with some fancy paint jobs, extra nickel plating, and a terrific ad campaign, he introduced new designs that were an instant success. Within a remarkably short time he controlled about 70 percent of the company’s stock, which he then used as collateral to buy more companies. The Cord Corporation, which was created in 1929, eventually controlled the companies that supplied Auburn and Cord with engines, frames, and bodies. The cars were assembled in Auburn from parts shipped in.
The 1926 Auburn is the first Cordera model, and a fine selection of Auburns from 1926 to 1936 fills more than half the showroom floor. These range from serviceable sedans to variations of the rakish Boattail Speedster, which was the design creation of Alan Leamy. Leamy was the first of two very young men—“boy designers”—who styled the company’s products during Cord’s tenure. Cord encouraged Leamy to create a car that looked different while making sure that it changed only slightly from year to year so as to protect its resale value.
The greatest changes weren’t in the sheet metal but under the hood and in the finish of these marques. Cord introduced bright and light multiple color combinations in interiors and exteriors at a time when black exteriors and taupe interiors were the rule. His Auburns had the first straighteight engine in a car priced under $1,000. Their Lycoming-built engines cranked out 120 horsepower, almost 50 percent more than the average engine of the “classic” era. Later a twospeed rear axle (also made by a Cordowned company) was added, permitting very high speeds on the open road. Cord’s Auburns were a good value, a well-equipped car selling for an average of $1,200 to $1,400. By the early thirties the company was prospering while other automakers were having a rough time, largely, Time reported, because the Auburn “looked rich … [and] answered the need of many a man who had lost his shirt but hoped his friends did not know it. It made many another man who never had it to lose feel like a million dollars.”
In 1926 Cord bought out August and Fred Duesenberg of Indianapolis, whose famous name had been made on the racing circuit. In the early twenties the Duesenberg brothers had started making passenger cars, and there is a 1926 Model A Duesy in the area of the museum’s showroom devoted to Duesenberg and Cord. Although beautifully engineered and constructed, this preCord Duesenberg is as stolidly monumental as a tank. After acquiring the company, Cord acted with his usual swiftness, bringing in another young designer, Gordon Buehrig, to create Duesenberg designs for custom coachbuilders to assemble. He changed the image of the car from stodgy to stellar. Buehrig was another boy wonder; he came to Duesenberg when he was just twentyfive years old.
IN 1929 CORD UNVEILED THE DUE senberg Model J. It was a huge and powerful machine, its straighteight engine producing 265 horsepower, while the supercharged version, the SJ, developed 320. Duesenberg supplied the engine and chassis only and offered a wheelbase choice of 142.5 or 153.5 inches. The base price was $8,500, and the coachwork, often designed by Buehrig, might add another $10,000. It was a flamboyant car, capable of 120 mph, and appealed greatly to flamboyant personalities, Hollywood stars chief among them.
Also in 1929, having worked for two years with the Miller brothers (whose front-wheel-drive racing cars had often challenged Duesenberg), Cord introduced the L-29 Cord, a front-wheeldrive roadster. Alan Leamy styled the rakish and expensive car with special attention to the oval transmission-anddifferential cover and the flaring fenders, which were lifted high at the front to reveal the intricacies of the front drive. The L-29 was the first American production front-drive car and was a critical success but not a financial one. It stayed in production for several years before fading in 1932. Just 5,000 L-29s were made, and no Cords were produced in the 1933, 1934, or 1935 model years.
The 810 Cord of 1936 and the allbut-identical 812 model of 1937 came about as a bit of an accident. By then Leamy had left Auburn and Buehrig had taken his place. Buehrig was asked to create what our era would call a “mini” Duesenberg, but the project turned instead into the new Cord. The decision to produce it was made quickly in mid-1935 because it was going to be introduced at the New York Automobile Show in November of that year. Under the show’s rules, at least a hundred cars had to be already built or in production before a model could be displayed. Auburn’s prototype body shop worked day and night throughout the summer and fall to get them ready.
This was the first appearance of the “coffin-nosed” Cord—sleek, low, and with concealed headlights, a car that was to influence auto design for years. (In 1938, after Cord’s demise, Graham and Hupmobile, two Detroit carmakers, even bought the designs and tooling from Cord and produced cars—the Graham “Hollywood” and the Hupmobile “Skylark”—that were direct copies of this famous design.) The cars were outstandingly successful—but not successful enough to save the company. Even though 3,000 of the new Cords were sold, the plants of the Auburn Automobile Company and of Duesenberg, in Indianapolis, went silent in August 1937.
The decline had started some years before. The potential market for all of Cord Corporation’s cars was tiny, about one half of one percent of all car buyers, and as the Depression tightened, it just wasn’t good form to flaunt your money (if you still had any) by buying an expensive automobile. The Cord models 810 and 812 were striking design and engineering achievements, but their market was too limited to sustain the company.
Directly behind the beautiful public showroom, separated only by a sliding door, was the experimental engineering department. In this stark factory space, similar in size to the showroom, the innovative engineering ideas for Auburn and Cord cars were developed and tested. Now it serves as the exhibition area for another of the museum’s areas of collecting: classic cars from other manufacturers of the Auburn, Cord, and Duesenberg era.
A select group of splendid American marques can be seen here, including Lincoln, Packard, and Cadillac. A recent gift of a nickelplated 1930 Cadillac display chassis offers a view of how autos were built at the time—the heavier the better. Here, as in most other areas of the museum, the cars are given generous exhibition space so that one may see more than a row of radiators and headlights, and a view into the interiors is easily had. A space at the end of this floor, formerly the dynamometer test area, awaits conversion into a gallery for temporary exhibitions. The enclosed courtyard, site of the damaging fire, has been fully restored and is rented out for trade exhibits and banquets.
On the second floor the old accounting offices are occupied by the museum’s archives and library. The collection was started before the muscum’s founding by the local chapter of Tri Kappa, an Indiana philanthropic sorority, and was housed in a public library before being transferred to the museum. If the showroom is the museum’s heart, the archives are its soul, the place that holds the secrets about how the magical machines downstairs were designed, built, and sold. Some 50,000 original documents are here, including technical information on Auburn, Cord, and Duesenberg as well as other cars of the time, especially ones built in Indiana. There are also large numbers of original photographic negatives and prints, styling drawings and watercolors, and advertising ephemera.
Very little of this material had to be purchased. Gregg Buttermore, the museum’s archivist, says that “most of it just walked in the door” in the hands of former employees, descendants of employees, and other folks who knew that this material had to come “home.” Even though Alan Leamy had eventually been fired from Auburn, his widow presented the museum with an unrivaled collection of his original watercolor design sketches, some of which now hang in the styling area.
BUTTERMORE PARTICULARLY remembers an elderly woman who arrived one day and asked if the museum might be interested in some old material that had belonged to her father, who had worked for Duesenberg. She then handed over a large set of unique documents covering the development of the Model J Duesenberg, the car that ruled the desires of a generation. Told that the documents were very valuable and would bring a good price, the woman just shrugged and said that the museum was welcome to them because she didn’t want to store them any more. Today, with interest growing in all aspects of auto history, social and automotive historians, students, model makers, and auto restorers are increasingly frequent visitors to the archives.
Photographs throughout the museum show the building as it looked just after opening. There is nothing exceptional in them—desks and typewriters in the offices, drafting tables, lathes, and other tools in the engineering spaces—but these images are another reminder of the importance of this building to American automobile manufacture and of the authenticity of the experience every visitor now shares. Down the hall in the north wing, the site of another set of business offices is now given over to an exhibition on other automobiles made in Auburn. Early in the century the town rivaled Detroit as a carmaking center, but by 1915 all the makes besides Auburn—including Zimmerman, Kiblinger, and Mclntyre—had vanished. Examples of those cars are preserved here and in a few other collections. This gallery opens onto the executive suite, much of which has been restored. E. L. Cord’s office, which he used until he moved to Chicago in 1931, had been all but obliterated with bricked-up windows and dropped ceilings. It is now undergoing reconstruction.
THE SOUTH WING CONTAINED the engineering and styling departments. It is surprising to see how these beautiful automobiles came from such a domestic-looking studio, hardly larger than a living room, with just a couple of srnall drafting offices attached. Designing these cars was an intimate, personal, and indeed visionary business. Alan Leamy, hugely successful with the L-29 Cord and the Auburns of the late twenties and early thirties, was let go after creating the 1934 Auburn, which several executives regarded as a disaster. The problem centered on the appearance of the radiator grille and cowl, which the vice president found unacceptable, though today it is seen to fit perfectly with other designs of the time. Production of the 1934 models was stopped in midyear, a disastrous decision because no new Auburns were available for many months. Gordon Buehrig was quickly brought up from Indianapolis to fix the damage and went on to design the greatest Cords of all.”
A photograph of Buehrig hanging in the design area epitomizes the spirit of these designers. He is seated at his worktable, little pots of paint and a container of brushes within easy reach. Behind him curtains of homespun have been pulled to soften the bright sunlight. His suit and tie are protected by a loose-fitting smock, and before him is a partially completed watercolor rendering of a new auto design. He looks up at the photographer, paintbrush still in hand: the artist, working to turn the images seen in his mind’s eye into objects of dreams—and of commerce. Computers have made it easier to design complex automobiles, but the process remains what it has always been: primarily a matter of thought and intuition.
The styling room, carefully reconstructed even to the curtains, contains a model of an important Buehrig invention, the “styling bridge.” Now found in all auto design studios, the styling bridge fits over an auto model being shaped and makes it easier to plot critical measurements accurately from two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional clay. It takes the form of an inverted U and rolls on wheels that fit into tracks on either side of a central space on which the new design is formed.
Office, drafting, and engineering spaces outside the styling studio have been turned over to other large segments of the museum’s auto collection. Directly opposite the design rooms is an area devoted to pre-Cord Auburns, including a 1904 model, the museum’s earliest. A small adjacent space displays Buehrig’s other automotive design achievements, which included the 1951 Ford hardtop and several concept cars from the late forties to the late seventies, notable for their curiously blocky appearance. Gordon Buehrig enjoyed almost every teenage boy’s dream: He designed cars and lived to see them mold the fantasies of generations of Americans.
The sun-filled rooms of the south wing also contain the last two groups in the museum’s collections: cars made in Indiana —Studebaker is here, of course, along with Haynes, Lexington, Premier, Stutz, Apperson, and a few other of the 430 marques once made in the state—and cars with significant historical impact. These “special interest” cars are in the old engineering development room. During its early years the museum took almost any car of any merit it was offered (motorcycles too). A number of them ended up here. Bob Sbarge and his staff are working to winnow them down to cars that demonstrate mythic or technical achievements or both, such as the Jaguar XK-120 of the early fifties and the 1956 Thunderbird, cars that helped shape the auto technology and auto desires of their time.
THE AUBURN CORD DUESEN berg Museum is now in its twenty-second year. In reaching maturity, it has spawned another automobile museum in town. Behind the Auburn Automobile Company’s corporate offices two other buildings now stand, the last remains of the factory complex. These were once the parts and factory-service facilities and the experimental building in which the prototype 810 Cords were built so quickly. They are huge—more than 110,000 square feet under one roof—but by 1990 they were very badly deteriorated. When they came on the market a few years ago, the board of trustees of the museum thought they were too great a burden to take on. John Martin Smith stepped in again; these buildings, too, just had to be saved.
They have been, and within the reborn buildings the National Automotive and Truck Museum of the United States (NATMUS) and the National Automotive and Truck Model and Toy Museum of the United States are taking form. NATMUS, now open on a seasonal basis, exhibits about seventy-five autos and trucks made since World War II. The three museums get along well with one another, and the town of Auburn has been changed by them. It’s now a tourist center, the self-proclaimed “Home of the Classics,” with the six-day run of the annual A-C-D Festival alone drawing more than 250,000 visitors to this town of fewer than 10,000 people.
Yet for all the tourism, and all the glitter and flash of these magnificent machines encased in their historically resonant and beautiful surroundings, the spirit of the museum is perhaps best captured in its volunteers, a few of whom actually worked for Auburn Automobile or Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg. John McQuown, now seventyfive and retired after forty-eight years of automobile service work, is one of them. He started after World War II at the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Company as part of a six-man team restoring Cords. His crew included men who had been with Auburn since the teens and twenties. Now, in a voice that mingles nostalgia and passion, he recalls that “those guys taught me so much. I saw how things used to be and what dedication meant. I really learned what craftsmanship was all about. They insisted on perfection, and those cars were perfection. They are works of art.”
Yes, these automobiles are works of art, and experiencing them here is made far richer by seeing them protected and exhibited in this unique building—one that is beautiful in its own right as well as being a historic center for automobile manufacturing. Here many of these cars were first given form, and from here a remarkable American automobile company grew, prospered, and died. It is a real credit to this small town that it took on the challenge and saved its heritage. A rich automotive legacy—the apogee of a particularly American art—lives on in Auburn, Indiana.
