Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / The Auburn, Cord and Duesenberg Museum

Transcript

The Auburn, Cord and Duesenberg Museum · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  John Summers is the motoring historian.
• 0:02
  He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into
• 0:06
  a fairly inept sports bike rider.
• 0:08
  Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of
• 0:12
  cheap and fast and not much reliable.
• 0:15
  On his show, he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new
• 0:18
  and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel
• 0:35
  Good day, good morning, good afternoon.
• 0:37
  It is John Summers, the motoring historian.
• 0:40
  I'm on the road and driving between, uh, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Indianapolis,
• 0:47
  Indiana, doing a bit of a museum tour.
• 0:49
  Probably the reason that you tuned in to this is that you're interested
• 0:51
  in the Auburn, Cord and Duesenberg
• 0:56
  Museum since that's what I said I was gonna talk about
• 0:58
  in the title of this video.
• 1:00
  Now, longtime listeners will know that the title doesn't usually stray me.
• 1:05
  I'm trying to actually deliver people something meaningful.
• 1:08
  Let's sort of begin in the most obvious place here.
• 1:13
  What is a museum?
• 1:14
  It can be one of two things, right?
• 1:17
  It can either be a bunch of stuff, some of it interesting, some of it not, varying
• 1:23
  to diff- people, different cultures, different times, a bunch of stuff.
• 1:27
  Or it can be stories that are crafted to make sure that the people visiting
• 1:35
  the space, museum, art gallery, whatever it is, that is crafted
• 1:40
  to make it accessible for them
• 1:44
  So for it to be accessible, it has to be something that resonates in you.
• 1:47
  So if you never enjoyed riding fast on a horse or skiing fast, you're gonna sort
• 1:54
  of struggle perhaps to, to understand why people might find motorcycle
• 1:59
  racing exciting, that kind of thing.
• 2:02
  So the place to begin with this is that, you know, most
• 2:06
  museums are a bunch of stuff.
• 2:09
  They're not the stories.
• 2:10
  So the stories are sort of fighting to get out of the giant pile of stuff.
• 2:16
  Now, I had this thought at the Baseball Hall of Fame, which
• 2:21
  I recently visited, because I don't really care about baseball.
• 2:24
  But I was very interested to see how the story was told and to see how the
• 2:28
  people around me received the story.
• 2:30
  That was fascinating to me, especially my son and father-in-law,
• 2:34
  who are baseball fans, right?
• 2:36
  That was fascinating.
• 2:37
  The Auburn Cord Duesenberg
• 2:42
  Museum is in what little is left of the Auburn factory.
• 2:46
  Duesenberg became a part of the empire that E.L. Cord put together,
• 2:53
  and E.L. Cord is really the important sort of mover and shaker.
• 3:00
  He bought Duesenberg fundamentally, and then kept the important guy, Fred
• 3:07
  Duesenberg, on as chief engineer.
• 3:08
  Not that the brother wasn't important.
• 3:10
  We'll talk about that in a minute, 'cause this is a point about really Auburn,
• 3:15
  Cord, and Duesenberg for me is I wanted to understand the Duesenberg creation myth.
• 3:21
  That's the brand that everyone's heard of, Auburn and Cord, like… I know if you
• 3:26
  know cars, they're like cool, American, and front-wheel drive, and elongated,
• 3:30
  and Gordon Buehrig, and I, I, I know.
• 3:33
  But if you are not steeped in this space, if you are like my producer, you
• 3:39
  think everything with… doesn't have a headlight in the fender and wasn't
• 3:43
  made after 1945, you'd call everything like that a chitty bang bang car.
• 3:48
  This is the 101 on Duesenberg for the people who look at everything
• 3:56
  that was made before the war as just a chitty bang bang car.
• 3:59
  So to contextualize Duesenberg, Bentley won Le Mans repeatedly,
• 4:06
  beating not just American marks, but other European, you know, French,
• 4:11
  Italian, German marks as well.
• 4:14
  And they did this in a car which, y- you know, increasing amounts of horsepower
• 4:20
  through the '20s, but never more than 200, even in the Speed Six form.
• 4:27
  The Blowers perhaps, but, you know, they broke, didn't they?
• 4:30
  You didn't win Le Mans with a Blower Bentley.
• 4:32
  You won it with a Speed Six.
• 4:33
  My point is that if you compare those power figures with the power figures
• 4:39
  of a supercharged Duesenberg 265, you can see that the Duesenberg was
• 4:46
  in a completely different league.
• 4:48
  It was a completely different league to the cars that were winning Le Mans.
• 4:51
  And of course, Duesenberg had already won at Le Mans.
• 4:56
  They did in 1921 when it was a Grand Prix.
• 4:59
  So I'm arriving at the museum wanting to understand more about Fred and Augie
• 5:08
  and wanting to see cool stuff related to them, wanting to get a sense of them.
• 5:16
  And in that sense, you know, I think the museum is very, very successful.
• 5:23
  I wanted to come to this museum because it has… When you see photographs of it,
• 5:28
  it is the showroom that the company used to present new models to its dealers.
• 5:35
  So it's a little bit like Fred Simeone's place in Philadelphia in terms of
• 5:43
  a sort of period correct scene, but in a museum setting that has a sort
• 5:48
  of musty, fusty kind of feel, which very much puts it in the category
• 5:55
  of a bunch of old stuff rather than stories which are carefully curated
• 6:03
  and where the story is told clearly through compelling choices of objects.
• 6:10
  So you know I love a degre- a digression.
• 6:12
  I'm gonna digress on the back of piece of cardboard agenda.
• 6:16
  I'm gonna digress on that by talking about hood ornaments.
• 6:19
  They have the most spectacular collection of hood ornaments I've ever seen.
• 6:24
  I had to tear myself away from the hood ornaments and get back on the clock of
• 6:29
  trying to understand Duesenberg and what it was that created that awesome 265
• 6:37
  horsepower thing called the Model J, which is the ultimate chitty bang bang.
• 6:42
  Now, I'm gonna use as a cover shot a Duesenberg Model J. The important
• 6:47
  thing about the styling is that the grill, the height of the grill, it goes
• 6:53
  straight back to the cowl, but the cowl is higher than the height of the door.
• 6:59
  So it gives this sort of engine and grill, and the whole car seems to be leaping at
• 7:06
  you down the road because of that drop away just at the bottom of the windshield,
• 7:11
  just at the bottom of the scuttle.
• 7:13
  I hope you can see what I'm talking about.
• 7:15
  And of course, this is an era when you're buying the car as a rolling
• 7:20
  chassis and then commissioning your own coach builder to design the car.
• 7:26
  So this is taste can be awesome or people's taste can be absolutely terrible.
• 7:31
  Most people did, you know, boring banker kind of vehicles.
• 7:36
  You know, bankers bought cars that, you know, they wanted to
• 7:39
  be able to wear their hats in.
• 7:40
  But, you know, there were a few movie stars, people like Miles Collier recently,
• 7:45
  well, I say recently, some years ago now, sold a Gary Cooper Duesenberg.
• 7:51
  This is like a two-seat roadster.
• 7:52
  This is all the engine with as little bodywork as possible.
• 7:56
  So those kind of cars are few and far between, ones that are built to
• 7:59
  that kind of ruthless specification.
• 8:02
  And a lot of cars have had different bodies on them over the years.
• 8:06
  But the, the important thing to think about here is that the Duesenberg
• 8:12
  is the pinnacle interwar American marque, and I would go so far as to
• 8:17
  say the pinnacle American marque Why?
• 8:21
  Well, because these chitty bang bang cars were made with a
• 8:24
  different kind of workmanship.
• 8:26
  When you sit in a Mercedes now, the technology is impressive.
• 8:29
  When you sat in a Mercedes in the 1930s, the dashboard was made of mother of pearl.
• 8:34
  If you don't know what I'm… I'm… I'll put a link to a Mercedes 540K dashboard
• 8:39
  with a mother of pearl inlay on it.
• 8:41
  This kind of detail, beauty, and craftsmanship abounded in these cars
• 8:48
  that were made between the wars.
• 8:51
  So this is why with these kind of cars, you'll hear them talked about in terms of
• 8:55
  the car, Duesenberg, the model, SJ, but then it'll be by Murphy or by Van Buren
• 9:04
  or some weird name like that, that even as a car guy sometimes you haven't heard of.
• 9:09
  And that's because it was some dude in a shed with hammer and nails making
• 9:14
  the body, just like they made carts.
• 9:17
  And this is quite interesting, right?
• 9:19
  Because that's how Auburn started out.
• 9:21
  There was some Elsdre or Exdre or whatever.
• 9:25
  They were cart makers.
• 9:26
  They had like a production line of carts, and then they started doing cars as well.
• 9:31
  And that's interesting to me because Studebaker did exactly the same thing.
• 9:35
  And actually, the Studebaker Museum has a similar kind of feel, and Fort Wayne has
• 9:40
  a similar kind of feel to Auburn, Indiana.
• 9:43
  I mean, I guess they're both Indiana towns.
• 9:45
  And we'll talk a little bit about the Studebaker Museum in a moment there.
• 9:49
  And you'll probably see on the Motorand Podcast Network, there's a bunch of
• 9:52
  other content from stuff that we as, as a team did at the Studebaker Museum.
• 9:58
  But look, right, for the preamble, I've talked, haven't I, a lot,
• 10:02
  and I've not really said whether or not the museum was any good.
• 10:04
  Is the museum any good?
• 10:06
  Yeah.
• 10:06
  Yeah, it really is.
• 10:07
  If you wanna see a lot of cars, there's a lot of cars.
• 10:10
  In lots of ways, it's the way that the Black Hawk was years ago.
• 10:14
  So there are lots of Olympian-era cars, cars of the '20s and '30s, lots
• 10:21
  of gleaming chrome, lots of perfect paint, lots of opportunity to compare
• 10:28
  different vintage vehicle body styles.
• 10:32
  There's also a really good story telling the evolution of Auburn
• 10:38
  through the brass era Nice lighting.
• 10:43
  They did something that the Blackhawk never wanted us to do.
• 10:46
  So the whole thing with the Blackhawk is this is very much museums according
• 10:51
  to the philosophy of the 1980s.
• 10:53
  And this is the black marble, and the cars set off up against the
• 10:57
  black marble with spotlighting.
• 10:59
  So, uh, ACD has a couple of rooms that are really full of these
• 11:04
  kind of very glossy, shiny cars.
• 11:07
  I would say that's not the element of the museum that I enjoyed the most.
• 11:10
  The element of the museum that I enjoyed the most is
• 11:13
  there's a room of Buehrig's clay modeling.
• 11:17
  Now, I'm not the biggest Gordon Buehrig styling fan.
• 11:20
  I know it's sacrilegious to say that, as for many people, but I'm, I'm
• 11:24
  just not the biggest fan of his work.
• 11:26
  But the offices in which these clay models were made and, and how that was done, that
• 11:31
  had a wonderful kind of old world feel.
• 11:35
  There's a hallway where you can walk and look at all the different
• 11:38
  advertisements, and it feels like you're in the office as it was in the 1930s.
• 11:45
  That part of the museum I was really, really taken with.
• 11:49
  So I had that experience where I was, like, overwhelmed
• 11:51
  by the cars on the floor.
• 11:53
  And I see more elegance in the artwork.
• 11:57
  I love reading the stories of the people.
• 12:00
  I love understanding what made the
• 12:05
  thing compelling early on.
• 12:07
  So the Duesenberg Model A was the first car to have four-wheel hydraulic
• 12:12
  brakes, and it had an inline eight.
• 12:14
  It was the first car to have an inline eight.
• 12:16
  I mean, if you would just read the specifications, and if you were a car
• 12:20
  guy who knew anything, you'd order it.
• 12:22
  If you had the money, obviously.
• 12:23
  Yeah, I mean, it goes without saying you'd have to have…
• 12:25
  you'd have to have money, right?
• 12:28
  I think that just bears repeating.
• 12:30
  The Duesenberg Model A was the first production car with
• 12:35
  four-wheel hydraulic brakes.
• 12:37
  Up to that time, they weren't hydraulic, or they were only on
• 12:41
  the front axle or the back axle.
• 12:44
  And it was the first series production car to have an inline eight-cylinder engine.
• 12:50
  So this is a configuration of engine.
• 12:52
  20 years later, Mercedes are gonna be able to supercharge to make more
• 12:58
  horsepower than any Formula 1 car until the Renault turbo cars of the 1970s.
• 13:05
  So we can see that Fred and Augie, with the Model A in 1921,
• 13:11
  they were a long way ahead.
• 13:12
  They were a long way ahead in terms of what can we do to make the most power,
• 13:16
  and they were a long way ahead in terms of what do we actually need to do to
• 13:21
  make the car drivable, the brakes.
• 13:27
  The showroom setting, impressive, but too many cars.
• 13:32
  Information, as Tony Stewart, the NASCAR driver once said, "If you wanna
• 13:37
  hide something from me, put it in a book." I learned a lot from the plinth.
• 13:41
  I, uh, everything I'm gonna tell you I learned from the plinth.
• 13:43
  I didn't read anything else.
• 13:45
  But here, is the story really- Landing.
• 13:49
  Is the story really landing?
• 13:52
  Are audience members actually understanding what was so special
• 13:58
  and compelling and obvious to contemporaries about Duesenberg?
• 14:05
  Okay, here's what I'm gonna say.
• 14:06
  I listened to the conversations that two other couples had who were people
• 14:11
  who were going round the museum.
• 14:13
  Like many people in art galleries, they knew they were looking at art, but they
• 14:19
  didn't really get the difference between Picasso and Rembrandt and high school art.
• 14:25
  They weren't quite there yet.
• 14:27
  The dude had ridden there on a Harley with his wife, girlfriend, whatever.
• 14:32
  He had not grasped how the whole thing that he, everyone loves about
• 14:37
  Harleys is they're so brutal machines.
• 14:40
  I mean, he missed… I mean, I don't know, maybe he was there for a minute.
• 14:43
  'Cause like me, I think the thing I saw him look at the longest was the
• 14:49
  V16 aero engine that the government had the Duesenberg brothers design
• 14:56
  in the war as part of a war contract, even though at the time there was
• 14:59
  no plane big enough for it to fit.
• 15:01
  And in fact, there never was a plane big enough to fit, and the engine just sits
• 15:06
  there as a sort of bizarre white elephant.
• 15:08
  But yeah, that was my favorite exhibit.
• 15:10
  It had some whizzbang clever tech on it that aided manufacturing and- This is
• 15:17
  the First World War, just to be clear.
• 15:19
  This V16 was designed as an aero engine in the First World War.
• 15:27
  So I should say at this point that Fred and Augie, the creators of the
• 15:32
  Duesenberg legend, are self-taught.
• 15:35
  And there's one picture, and I may use this as a thumbnail instead of the SJ.
• 15:40
  The two of them looking at the camera, and the caption underneath says something
• 15:43
  about them looking more like farm boys than like the world's leading automotive
• 15:48
  engineers, and they kind of do.
• 15:51
  So like the Studebakers, German extraction, settled here, family moved
• 15:57
  around a bit, didn't quite find the right trade initially, but in time settled
• 16:03
  into, like so many of the really early fellow motoring pioneers, guys like
• 16:09
  Jarrett and S.F. Edge in, in England or, you know, the French fellows as well.
• 16:14
  It started on bicycles, but the difference between a bicycle and a bicycle with an
• 16:18
  engine is so small that really that's sort of where it, it originally came from.
• 16:24
  And that, of course, is why motorsport, partly why motorsport is welded into
• 16:28
  the very DNA of motoring, was that the racing was there before and, and
• 16:33
  Fred and Augie were all about the racing on bicycles first, and they
• 16:37
  had a bicycle shop in their 20s.
• 16:40
  So the next thing to think about is E.L. Cord and his connection,
• 16:46
  because fundamentally, the car I spoke about, the straight A hydraulic
• 16:50
  brake guy, he didn't sell very well.
• 16:52
  He was the Model A. He didn't sell very well and then the company went
• 16:57
  into receivership in the mid-'20s, and the buyer was this guy, E.L. Cord.
• 17:02
  Now, I'd heard of him before, and as a car guy, you know the name 'cause
• 17:06
  of, like, the coffin-nosed Cords.
• 17:08
  But he basically just one of these people who just had cars and racing and
• 17:15
  business just coursing through his veins.
• 17:18
  As a teenager, he was buying Model T Fords that had been damaged, throwing away the
• 17:25
  body, tuning them or hot-rodding them a little, and then flipping them off.
• 17:29
  And that had evolved into selling, I think it was a brand called Mason, and then
• 17:35
  he'd done really successfully with Mason.
• 17:39
  There was another brand that he was asked to do, like Auburn.
• 17:43
  That was how he came to do it.
• 17:44
  Auburn was struggling.
• 17:46
  Auburn had done like the wagons.
• 17:48
  They'd pivoted to cars.
• 17:49
  They'd been pretty successful.
• 17:50
  They were struggling a bit in the early '20s.
• 17:53
  Everyone was.
• 17:54
  They hired him, and they were impressed because he didn't want a
• 17:57
  salary or didn't want a full salary.
• 17:59
  He was happy to, like, work for, you know, a share of the success,
• 18:03
  and he turned Auburn around.
• 18:05
  You think of it, he turns Auburn around, then he has these ambitions to grow
• 18:11
  what he's doing, similar to the way that Billy Durant grew General Motors.
• 18:15
  So when he has the opportunity, remember, he was a racing guy.
• 18:20
  He knew how superior Duesenberg engineering was.
• 18:24
  Probably knew how awesome an engineer Fred was.
• 18:28
  Well, almost definitely did, right?
• 18:30
  Because when he bought the company, he kept Fred on as chief engineer and told
• 18:35
  him to design the Model J, which is what we know, and that's why I keep coming
• 18:39
  back to this, that if you're only gonna learn about one pre-war chitty bang
• 18:44
  bang marque, it's Duesenberg, and if you're only gonna learn about one model,
• 18:48
  it's a Model J and a supercharged one.
• 18:51
  So the room that had the V16 in it, it had an engine that Duesenberg made
• 18:56
  under license From Bugatti in the war, but it was like a U16 they called it.
• 19:03
  I didn't spend a long time looking at that because I'd spent
• 19:05
  so long in that room already.
• 19:06
  The other thing I liked in that room, the reason why I spent so long
• 19:10
  in there, was there was a timeline of the three marks and significant
• 19:15
  engines or engineering developments.
• 19:17
  So that's the timeline of Auburn starting as this Ekins or Elkins wagon
• 19:23
  people, and then the wagons becoming Auburn, and then Auburn being run by
• 19:28
  Cord, and then Cord buying Duesenberg, and then creating the Cord cars, and
• 19:35
  that's why everything's here, and that's why this is peak art deco.
• 19:44
  Now, what is really interesting about what Duesenberg and what people like
• 19:48
  Ford represent, because remember, the greatness of Duesenberg is the Model
• 19:53
  J. So it's Ford saying, "You know what?
• 19:57
  Forget the debt to the past.
• 19:59
  Fred, you just designed the best passenger car that's ever been designed.
• 20:02
  On you go, Sonny Jim."
• 20:04
  And arguably he did.
• 20:05
  And now that's why Ford deserves such a, in my opinion, such
• 20:09
  a strong shout in the story.
• 20:12
  In the museum, they made a big deal out of this fellow Snow, who was the
• 20:16
  financial controller, but I didn't dig deeply into the plinth on him.
• 20:21
  The advertising was all lifestyle-based.
• 20:24
  It was like she drives a Duesenberg and all these, like, beautiful women.
• 20:29
  I'm gonna put a couple of pictures up.
• 20:31
  I mean, it's exquisite art, and the women are all exquisitely elegant.
• 20:36
  But this is a woman from behind.
• 20:38
  You're looking at her from behind, and she is talking to her gardener,
• 20:43
  and you can see beautiful gardens out there, another gardener working,
• 20:47
  and the only face you can see is the head gardener fellow's face, and he's
• 20:53
  looking up into the queen's face.
• 20:55
  Her tagline is, "She drives a Duesenberg." It says it all, right?
• 20:59
  It, it's so much more than the clever marketing.
• 21:03
  There's this fellow Leaming as well, who I read more about, and he's the
• 21:08
  fellow that really made Auburns when there were those front-wheel drive guys
• 21:13
  with the swoopy nose, and he growned up, you know, that weird transaxle
• 21:19
  that they have at the front, these front-wheel drive Auburns and Cords.
• 21:23
  This fellow Leaming, Leaming did the front end of the Model J. So in my
• 21:28
  mind now, the greatness of the Model J is Fred's engineering and racing
• 21:34
  prowess, but Ford's money and business vision and the styling, because the
• 21:41
  styling, the mustache that Model Js have, that was this Leaming fellow.
• 21:50
  So when I worked at the Blackhawk, we always wanted to have, like, mannequins
• 21:54
  to, like, demonstrate to kids, 'cause a lot of museum traffic is kids, right?
• 21:59
  So it's worth really trying to appeal to the younger audience.
• 22:03
  Now, one of the nice things about communicating to the younger audience
• 22:06
  is you often inadvertently communicate with a lot of adults who you might
• 22:11
  otherwise not communicate with.
• 22:12
  And remember, with the kids, you're not dumbing down the message 'cause
• 22:15
  they smell that bullshit straight away.
• 22:18
  You're thinking about ways to simplify the message.
• 22:21
  So at the ACD, they have mannequins, and they had a whole thing, special
• 22:27
  exhibit, that compared cars and dresses.
• 22:31
  This is a great idea, but to put these, like, old dresses on these, like,
• 22:37
  bad old mannequins, and it's, like, dustily in the corner of the museum
• 22:42
  The cars, they were the opposite of fusty and old-fashioned and boring and
• 22:50
  not relevant to young people today.
• 22:53
  So in that sense, the museum failed to remind us of what was so shazam and
• 23:02
  awesome and the biggest Instagram flex ever that Duesenbergs were in period.
• 23:10
  I- it's a little disappointing that that message didn't land fully.
• 23:19
  God, what a incredible, audacious visionary.
• 23:22
  'Cause he didn't just do cars, right?
• 23:24
  The museum has planes in.
• 23:26
  Again, right, it's funny how I keep comparing to the Blackhawk here, but
• 23:30
  something that we used to do in the Blackhawk, especially if we had catered
• 23:34
  events, instead of just letting people roam around, you would have gallery hosts.
• 23:41
  So not security guards, but you, you were also there to say to people,
• 23:44
  you know, "Don't drunkenly fall on the cars, please." But you're also
• 23:49
  there to chat with the people in a host-y, choose bit kind of way.
• 23:53
  Now,
• 23:55
  I personally don't like that kind of service, but I recognize many
• 24:00
  people like that kind of service.
• 24:02
  I always feel uncomfortable striking up conversation with people.
• 24:06
  When there's a plinth as well, I like to learn from the plinth in a museum.
• 24:12
  So, and now the Blackhawk didn't have plinth.
• 24:14
  And, you know, when I did it, I wouldn't just approach people.
• 24:17
  I would see if people were interested, and then I would deliver people a
• 24:21
  tidbit of information about the car.
• 24:23
  If at that point they go, "Oh, yeah," and walk off, all right,
• 24:27
  fine, they don't wanna know more.
• 24:29
  Sometimes people talk to you, and they wanna know more.
• 24:31
  Really, what you're looking for is people to have that enhanced experience.
• 24:36
  Now, I'm left-handed.
• 24:38
  I like the musty, crusty museums.
• 24:40
  I like to read the plinths.
• 24:42
  I don't like to be interrupted.
• 24:44
  So any kind of gallery hosting, for me, feels intrusive.
• 24:49
  I don't take tours.
• 24:50
  I don't want somebody else's… Somebody like me, 'cause the people
• 24:53
  who create the audio guides are professional storytellers, aren't they?
• 24:57
  It's just… The last time I was at the Brooklands Museum in England, they had
• 25:00
  this, like, asshole interrupting me.
• 25:03
  I'm looking at the Bentley.
• 25:04
  This asshole starts talking to me about it.
• 25:07
  I don't wanna talk to you about it.
• 25:08
  I, I'm just looking at it.
• 25:09
  I, I… All of this shit you're telling me about how they won Le Mans, I know.
• 25:14
  I know that before you were born.
• 25:16
  Why are you spoiling my experience?
• 25:18
  If I wanted an infomercial, I'd be watching the infomercial of YouTube.
• 25:23
  Now, I know most people might not know all that stuff.
• 25:26
  But I just do not like to be interrupted whilst I'm looking,
• 25:31
  in the case of Brooklands.
• 25:32
  Sorry, young fella, you know, noble effort volunteering in the museum, but fuck off.
• 25:37
  Well, this old bastard did the same thing in the ACD Museum.
• 25:42
  I saw him come in, right?
• 25:43
  He burst out of some side office and accosted this poor woman who
• 25:47
  was really watching the video that was the history of the Three Marks.
• 25:51
  I was like, "Noble effort, woman." She was sat down.
• 25:54
  She was quietly watching.
• 25:55
  She was taking it all in.
• 25:56
  She and I had spent 10 minutes in peaceable silence, me reading the plinth-
• 26:02
  Her watching the video and learning.
• 26:04
  Then this old bastard comes out and starts telling her all about
• 26:08
  what he wants to talk about.
• 26:10
  Like, dude, ah.
• 26:12
  I know like volunteering good and gets you out of the house and all of that,
• 26:16
  but you can't just start telling people.
• 26:18
  So that hurt my ears a little bit and, you know, well, I'm like, you know, just
• 26:23
  trying to decide what I'm gonna do next.
• 26:25
  And he comes and accosts me, and I'm like, "No, I don't care about Gordon Gurich.
• 26:30
  I don't care about coffin-nosed Corbs.
• 26:33
  If you want a great story, I'll tell you a great story.
• 26:36
  My beta Camaro once jump-started a Corb in the foyer of the Blackhawk on
• 26:43
  a docent's favorite ride." Fred Kern, who owned that Corb and who nobody drove
• 26:48
  it to the docent's favorite ride event, even though it broke down all the time.
• 26:52
  Fred Kern, we miss you.
• 26:53
  You know how in every car guy environment, this is just an aside, there's
• 26:58
  always like somebody who knows more.
• 27:00
  So the producer, right, he's really good at hot rodding
• 27:02
  Volkswagens and Audis, right?
• 27:05
  You know, when I say to him, "Should I buy one of these cheap
• 27:07
  V10 Audis?" You know, hot rod Audi S6s or whatever, should I do it?
• 27:12
  He's like, "No, they break down all the time." And I'm like, "Well,
• 27:15
  can you fix them?" And he went, "Well, yeah, you can, but the 4.2 is
• 27:19
  better." So he's my go-to Audi person.
• 27:22
  I bet you he will know people in the Audi community who know far, far more than him.
• 27:28
  Well, in the community of the Blackhawk, amongst the docents that
• 27:33
  I worked with 10, 15 years ago now, it was acknowledged, we all just knew
• 27:38
  Fred knew more than the rest of us.
• 27:41
  He just did, always had.
• 27:43
  And in the later years, because he knew this, he wouldn't ask people questions.
• 27:46
  If he'd done a presentation about something, he'd just stand up and
• 27:49
  give tangential information about it.
• 27:52
  It was kind of weird and off-putting if you didn't know him, but if you knew
• 27:56
  him, it was really, really awesome.
• 27:58
  So final thing on Fred Kern.
• 28:01
  He was chairman of the BMW Club of California or something like
• 28:07
  that, some kind of BMW club.
• 28:08
  He loved BMWs.
• 28:10
  He had a Z3M Roadster.
• 28:12
  He also was one of the people who was instrumental in making sure the E60
• 28:17
  M5, some of them you could get with an actual three-pedal manual transmission.
• 28:23
  Not in Europe, but in America you could.
• 28:25
  He negotiated it, and he negotiated himself the very first
• 28:30
  three-pedal stick shift M6 coupe.
• 28:34
  So he had a burgundy M6 coupe.
• 28:37
  I wonder what happened to that car when he toddled off this mortal.
• 28:41
  I wonder where that car is now.
• 28:43
  I hope it's being enjoyed.
• 28:45
  My word, I would like that car now.
• 28:51
  Yeah, so to round up it, the gallery hosting, you need to, like, turn it off
• 28:55
  'cause this bloke basically chased me upstairs, and I fled into the advertising
• 29:01
  and offices where I wouldn't be disturbed.
• 29:03
  And it turned out that was an awesome sort of place to be hanging out rather
• 29:07
  than in amongst, you know, all the sort of Black Orc-y kind of cars.
• 29:10
  They do have flints there, and of course, it's a fair point that they used to make
• 29:14
  at the Black Orc that in any art gallery, people spend more time looking at the
• 29:18
  signs than they do at the paintings.
• 29:20
  In some ways, you wanna minimize the information, right?
• 29:24
  'Cause they're not even looking at it.
• 29:25
  You want them to actually look at the cars.
• 29:27
  But I don't know.
• 29:28
  I don't really care about Ortons.
• 29:30
  I looked at all of the Duesenbergs.
• 29:32
  Yeah, were they any different from what you would see at a
• 29:37
  car show that has Duesenbergs?
• 29:39
  Eh, you know, I, I don't… You know, I'm not, I'm not
• 29:42
  connoisseur enough really to say.
• 29:45
  I will say that the mannequins just cheapened the, the whole shebang.
• 29:50
  So to compare with the Studebaker Museum, I didn't look at the
• 29:55
  Studebaker Museum properly.
• 29:56
  I definitely didn't look at the cars.
• 29:58
  I just tried to understand the wagon creation myth.
• 30:02
  This is the Studebaker family.
• 30:03
  They settle.
• 30:04
  It, there seems to be a pattern of businesses being set up, which then fall
• 30:09
  into debt, meaning the family has to move.
• 30:12
  I don't know what that means.
• 30:13
  Does that mean you're running away from debt?
• 30:15
  Sort of seemed that way.
• 30:17
  They didn't really say that, but I just wondered what was going on there.
• 30:20
  They talked about the elder Studebaker having not very good
• 30:24
  business practices or, or anything.
• 30:26
  But I guess one fella luckily sold a load of wheelbarrows in
• 30:32
  the gold rush in California.
• 30:34
  You could make a great movie out of it.
• 30:36
  Right when all was lost at the Studebaker wagon factory, 'cause they'd
• 30:40
  overstretched themselves fulfilling wartime contracts for the Union Army.
• 30:45
  They'd overstretched themselves.
• 30:47
  But this fellow sells all these wheelbarrows.
• 30:49
  He comes back, and everything is just absolute tickety-boo after that.
• 30:55
  Because by the 1880s, they are the largest wagon producers in the world.
• 31:01
  This is quite interesting, right?
• 31:03
  Because what we're saying is, is that there was mass production
• 31:07
  of wheeled vehicles before the automobile, and it was done probably
• 31:12
  best in the world by Studebaker.
• 31:15
  Maybe there were equivalents in Europe, I don't know, but I just
• 31:19
  think that that's really interesting.
• 31:20
  And by these Elcar, Elcar, whatever, the forerunner of, uh, Auburn
• 31:26
  were, they did the same thing.
• 31:27
  And, and interestingly, Oakland, the forerunner of Pontiac, Oakland
• 31:32
  were wagon and buggy makers as well.
• 31:35
  So this is definitely a feature of manufacturing.
• 31:40
  At that time So I was amused in, you know, looking at the pictures of the
• 31:46
  Studebaker family, but some of them have very big beards, some of the men.
• 31:51
  The women just look really harsh.
• 31:53
  The men, one of them particularly, he's got this big beard.
• 31:56
  But it turns out the one with the big beard was the one that sold all the
• 31:59
  wheelbarrows So I, I said to one of the people that works in the museum
• 32:03
  afterwards, you know, I made a comment about the big beard, and, and she
• 32:06
  said, "Well, as, uh, when I tour school groups around, that's what they all say.
• 32:10
  They all comment on J.M. Studebaker's big beard." I'm like, "Yeah,
• 32:14
  rightly so." In an age of beards, this is a very impressive beard.
• 32:19
  And I mean, this is an absurd point, but it's worth making, is that in
• 32:22
  the ACD Museum, there is a wonderful photograph of people competing at the
• 32:29
  1929 Indianapolis 500, like the whole team, and it's a really wonderful picture.
• 32:35
  It's done in crystal clarity.
• 32:37
  It's all men, and none of them have beards.
• 32:41
  Like, I looked for a while thinking, "I'm gonna look for a beard," and
• 32:43
  then I thought, "This is absurd," and then I thought, "You know what?
• 32:46
  No." So I don't know, maybe, maybe one slipped past me,
• 32:49
  but nobody had a, had a beard.
• 32:51
  So it just goes to show how beards are a, a fashionable kind of thing,
• 32:56
  and everyone has a beard now.
• 32:57
  But nobody… Few people I've seen have a beard more impressive
• 33:01
  than J.M. Studebaker's.
• 33:04
  I asked Maria the, at the museum, what the other things the kids
• 33:08
  spotted were, and she said it was the carriages had four wheels, that they
• 33:13
  had brakes, that they had suspension.
• 33:15
  That quite often they will pick out when you say to them, you know, "What
• 33:18
  similarities are there with cars?"
• 33:20
  You know, they pull out a lot of kinds of similarities.
• 33:24
  Another interesting point she made was that they have this thing about
• 33:26
  contemporary cars, significant cars, like five great objects, but
• 33:31
  it's all sorts of different cars.
• 33:33
  I, I didn't get the full list.
• 33:34
  The point is that in a range of cars, regularly the kids' favorite is, like,
• 33:40
  a gen two Prius, and it's not because of the green credentials, but because
• 33:45
  their mom has one or their gran had one or they know somebody who has it.
• 33:49
  And it just amused me because very often in my class when we ask the students
• 33:54
  as an icebreaker, "What's your favorite car at the moment?" We say at the moment
• 33:58
  'cause as a car guy, you're going to have lots of favorites, aren't you?
• 34:02
  So we want a kind of visceral, like, off-the-cuff reaction.
• 34:06
  So, you know, if it was that Chevelle you saw on the way to the class, you can
• 34:09
  say so as a car guy without needing to decide exactly which great sports racing
• 34:15
  Ferrari it would need to be, you know?
• 34:17
  So you would be surprised how many people name a Toyota.
• 34:22
  It's always Toyotas.
• 34:23
  It's their car.
• 34:24
  They name their Toyota.
• 34:26
  I don't know if people have ever named their car when it wasn't a Toyota.
• 34:30
  I guess that's how normal car people relate, don't they?
• 34:33
  That they, their idea of the motoring adventure is exclusively through the
• 34:37
  vehicle that they've had adventure with.
• 34:40
  But that all the more is why a museum needs to make sure
• 34:44
  what it does is relevant.
• 34:46
  So this is why the aggressive gallery hosting is worse than no gallery hosting,
• 34:51
  because now you're driving people away.
• 34:56
  So to wrap up what happened to these marques, Studebaker, you may or may not
• 35:01
  know, struggles on into the '60s making cars that people talk fondly about
• 35:06
  them now, but if you just look at the styling and then you compare them with
• 35:10
  contemporary Chevrolets and Pontiacs, you can see why Studebaker didn't make it.
• 35:15
  Not only did Studebaker not make it, but automobile manufacturing
• 35:20
  in Indiana didn't make it.
• 35:22
  And if you're not American, that might not seem important, but if
• 35:25
  you have a look on the map, Indiana is a pretty long way from Detroit.
• 35:30
  So Detroit and our big three, Indiana had a whole separate
• 35:35
  automobile manufacturing going on.
• 35:37
  And what I learned in the ACD Museum which was really interesting, is that most of
• 35:42
  what they did was component manufacture.
• 35:45
  A little bit like Brough Superior.
• 35:47
  The Brough Superior was superior because George Brough Jr. used the
• 35:53
  best components, the best suspension, the best gearbox, the best engine.
• 35:59
  He put those components together and tested, engineered them well
• 36:03
  to create the best motorcycle.
• 36:04
  So with that in mind, the Indiana makers, and there were a couple of makers
• 36:09
  there, the, the Lexington from memory, the West Mullen, and the one that I
• 36:14
  found quite interesting was the Cole.
• 36:16
  Because the Cole, Billy Durant tried to add Cole to General Motors
• 36:20
  empire, even though… And then Cole, just like George Brough did, they
• 36:24
  advertised the fact that they weren't…
• 36:26
  They didn't make their own stuff.
• 36:27
  They advertised the fact that they bought all the components together.
• 36:31
  It's a little bit like PCs versus Macs, you know, where Ford is like the Mac,
• 36:35
  where I make everything in-house and I have a proprietary driving method 'cause
• 36:40
  the clutch is too hard for most people.
• 36:42
  Whereas Cole just bought the best kit, assembled it really, really well, tuned
• 36:46
  so well that Billy Durant felt that Cole were a potential rival for Cadillac.
• 36:52
  But what happened was when the economy changed, Cole looked at
• 36:57
  what it was gonna take to make the business survive and just folded.
• 37:02
  Like, it's another one of those weird what if kind of stories.
• 37:06
  But I just thought it was fascinating that the car industry in Indiana
• 37:10
  was this sort of component industry rather than, you know, in Detroit
• 37:15
  where, like, you made your own stuff.
• 37:17
  To that end, you know, one of the presentations, I dare say Eric, the
• 37:21
  producer there, will publish the story of the Hydra-Matic transmission, which we had
• 37:27
  at the Studebaker symposium just recently.
• 37:31
  One of the things that was interesting about that was that Buick and
• 37:35
  Oldsmobile developed separate competing technologies, which really
• 37:42
  is quite strange when you look back.
• 37:44
  It's over Hydra-Matic and the Dynaflow, I think were the two
• 37:48
  rivals So think about that.
• 37:51
  Between Indiana and Detroit, completely different manufacturing philosophies.
• 37:57
  Over in Detroit, there's Billy Durant with his competing divisions.
• 38:01
  Between these two, we'll get a better automatic transmission, and
• 38:04
  then I can put those on my Cadillac.
• 38:06
  Whereas just a few hundred miles away, over in Indiana,
• 38:10
  they're making components.
• 38:12
  They've got George Brough's philosophy.
• 38:14
  They're buying the very best components and assembling them
• 38:18
  to the very highest standards.
• 38:20
  But this technology is completely non-proprietorial.
• 38:24
  The Dynaflow and the Hydra-Matic, even the names show how proprietorial this is.
• 38:29
  This is only on a Buick.
• 38:30
  This is only on an Oldsmobile.
• 38:32
  Whereas by contrast, the philosophy in Indiana was we'll just buy
• 38:36
  the best components, and we'll build them to a high standard, and
• 38:39
  that's how we're gonna make cars.
• 38:42
  Kind of like the cart makers, right?
• 38:44
  That was how they made wagons and buggies and things before.
• 38:47
  Interesting, right?
• 38:51
  So my criticism of the Baseball Hall of Fame was that I'm not a baseball fan,
• 38:57
  but I can get excited watching baseball, even if my son's not playing, because
• 39:01
  of, you know, the tension of the game, the atmosphere, and that was completely
• 39:01
  missing in the Hall of Fame, not just
• 39:04
  in the Hall
• 39:10
  of Fame bit itself, in all of the exhibits That excitement and tension was missing.
• 39:17
  For my son, that didn't matter.
• 39:19
  Uh, that's not what you're gonna convey.
• 39:21
  You're not driving the cars, you're looking at them in the museum.
• 39:24
  And for him, the quality and caliber of exhibits, you know,
• 39:29
  great player bats, great players' jerseys, that was what excited him
• 39:36
  and made the experience compelling.
• 39:38
  And I think that this Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum, this is sort of
• 39:42
  interesting in the same way in that, you know, if you arrive at it in the
• 39:46
  way that I did with a lot of knowledge and with a clear idea of what you want
• 39:50
  to get out of it, it really delivers.
• 39:52
  But if you don't already understand the excitement of the game of baseball,
• 39:57
  this environment isn't gonna tell you what's great about Duesenberg.
• 40:00
  Why did Gary Cooper buy that Duesenberg?
• 40:02
  To go fast on Mulholland Drive, for heaven's sake.
• 40:04
  That's what it was about.
• 40:06
  You know, and, and I guess that's why the dresses were so poignant for me, is
• 40:09
  that those dresses on vivacious young women, the kind of young women who were
• 40:15
  meant to drive Duesenbergs according to the advertisement, that would've
• 40:19
  been so exciting and compelling and relevant for young people today and
• 40:26
  mid-century modern and all of that.
• 40:28
  And yet all of that is sort of lost.
• 40:31
  It's weird to me because I hate coming back to… Well, I don't
• 40:34
  hate coming back to Blackhawk, I just know the Blackhawk really well.
• 40:37
  And one of the things the Blackhawk used to do was they, they would
• 40:40
  have the cars raised up on diazes.
• 40:43
  Your eye line would be at the sort of top of the grill.
• 40:47
  So you are looking at the car in a, you know, almost as if it's
• 40:52
  running you over, running you over.
• 40:54
  That's- But it allows you to look at the lines, judge the lines In a
• 40:58
  completely different kind of way.
• 41:01
  If you've just got all the cars parked up in straight ranks, lit with a
• 41:05
  plinth, you know, the Mona Lisa, she just gets lost amongst all the others.
• 41:09
  Now, I spent a while looking at the prototypes, which they did a number of
• 41:15
  prototypes, a model called the X and a model called the Y Duesenberg, did they,
• 41:20
  in the run-up to doing the J. And it was interesting reading the plinth and
• 41:25
  digging into that, and the information is, is really there if you looked for it.
• 41:31
  So in that sense, it really delivered.
• 41:33
  But, I mean, they had stills from like old movies from E.L. Cord's life.
• 41:39
  I don't know what more do you-- what more can you do to make it come alive?
• 41:43
  I, I don't know.
• 41:44
  I don't know how to… Maybe less is more.
• 41:47
  What I mean is you have one car and you have it in a vacuum on its own, like they
• 41:53
  do in the auctions at Monterey each year.
• 41:57
  You know, they have, they stage the cars, particularly RM
• 42:02
  Sotheby's at the Portola Hotel.
• 42:04
  You know, they have like all the rooms inside and they position the
• 42:07
  cars in such a way that it's like a fashion show and it's been designed
• 42:12
  and curated in that kind of way.
• 42:14
  Now, if you were to do that with Duesenbergs or a Duesenberg rather than
• 42:20
  have all the other cars there and have…
• 42:22
  They have, and this is something I didn't mention, is they have at the
• 42:24
  back another museum of more modern cars that doesn't have anything to
• 42:29
  do with Auburn, Cord, or Duesenberg.
• 42:32
  And I guess we can all club together and it's better that there's strength
• 42:36
  in numbers, but having all these like, you know, having like muscle cars
• 42:41
  and stuff from the '60s and '70s, I didn't, I didn't even look in there.
• 42:45
  That's what the people at the front desk told me.
• 42:48
  That feels a bit like Mercedes-Benz buying Brooklyns.
• 42:51
  It might make sense economically, but it just kind of sticks
• 42:54
  in the craw a little bit.
• 42:56
  The building's nice art deco and, you know, the frontage
• 43:00
  piece really looks good.
• 43:02
  Yeah, there was a little bit of construction work going on when
• 43:04
  I was there, but, you know, it's good that they're maintaining
• 43:07
  these kind of buildings.
• 43:09
  All right.
• 43:10
  Here's what I'm kicking around about.
• 43:12
  I feel like I'm wondering if the more visual aids we use, whatever they are,
• 43:19
  whatever we call them, museum, slide, video, generative AI representation, I
• 43:26
  feel like the more of that we use, the further we get from the fundamentals
• 43:31
  of storytelling 'cause the fundamentals of storytelling are one person telling
• 43:37
  somebody else what this object is.
• 43:39
  This Duesenberg was the one that Jimmy Murphy used to win
• 43:45
  the 1921 French Grand Prix.
• 43:47
  This win very likely what made E.L. Cord feel like Fred Duesenberg
• 43:53
  knew what the F he was doing.
• 43:55
  That led to arguably the greatest American car of all time.
• 44:01
  That should have been the story, shouldn't it?
• 44:03
  And it wasn't.
• 44:04
  But if that had been the story, I'd have told you it lacked depth, wouldn't I?
• 44:08
  I'd have been pissed off.
• 44:09
  I'd have been like, "Where's the musty archives? Where's the story of the guy
• 44:14
  who was crippled by polio but who went on to design the nose of the Duesenberg
• 44:21
  Model J?" Thank you, Drive Thru.
• 44:34
  This episode has been brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports as part
• 44:38
  of our Motoring Podcast Network.
• 44:39
  For more episodes like this, tune in each week for more exciting and educational
• 44:43
  content from organizations like The Exotic Car Marketplace, The Motoring
• 44:47
  Historian, Brake Fix, and many others.
• 44:49
  If you'd like to support Grand Touring Motorsports and the Motoring
• 44:52
  Podcast Network, sign up for one of our many sponsorship tiers at
• 44:56
  www.patreon.com/gtmotorsports.
• 45:01
  Please note that the content, opinions, and materials presented and
• 45:03
  expressed in this episode are those of its creator, and this episode has
• 45:07
  been published with their consent.
• 45:08
  If you have any inquiries about this program, please contact the creators
• 45:12
  of this episode via email or social media as mentioned in the episode.