AUBURN – For years, Labor Day weekend in Auburn has looked the same.
Visitors lining up for admission to the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum. Sleek classic cars gliding, roaring and occasionally sputtering through the city’s downtown streets. Thousands of potential buyers watching and bidding as hundreds of cars cross the auction block south of town at Kruse Auction Park.
This year, the auction that draws the biggest crowds and the biggest bucks is in jeopardy after classic car auction pioneer Dean Kruse and his company, Kruse International, lost their auctioneers’ licenses.
Kruse’s admitted sloppy business practices have resulted in dozens of pending lawsuits and came to a head late last month when the Indiana Auctioneer Commission told him the 70 complaints filed with the state’s attorney general were inexcusable.
That’s one picture of Dean Kruse.
The flip side is Kruse the philanthropist and Kruse the entrepreneur, who founded several museums near his auction park and has a gallery in the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum in his name. There’s Kruse, the face of Labor Day in Auburn, whose annual auction has drawn celebrities and massive crowds that have poured money into the northeast Indiana economy, year after year.
What happens now?
“Dean’s not going to be there, and that’s a paradigm shift, no doubt about that,” Auburn Mayor Norm Yoder said.
Kruse said after his license hearing in Indianapolis that he wants to find another auction company to hold an event at his park and hopes to make an announcement soon.
Whether or not that happens, at least two auto auctions – including one to be held a few miles from Kruse Auction Park – are planned. And Auburn’s classic car culture is as healthy as ever, many said.
“It’s still the place to be on Labor Day if you’re a car person,” Yoder said.
3 events, one city
Yoder calls the weekend “a three-legged stool.”
There’s the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Club’s annual meet, the non-profit Auburn Cord Duesenberg Festival formed to promote the car culture, and the Kruse International auction.
All three hold events over the weekend. While many of those events have overlapped, they haven’t always competed for attendance.
“It’s always amazed me at how many people go to each one and are relatively unaware of what’s going on at each site,” said John L. Baeke, National ACD Club Meet chairman.
The ACD Club, founded in 1952 for the restoration and preservation of Auburn, Cord and Duesenberg automobiles, first held a reunion in Auburn in 1956. The downtown event that would become the staple of the reunion – the Parade of Classics – wound its way past the DeKalb County Courthouse for the first time that year.
Fewer people might come to Auburn without the draw of the Kruse International auction. But whether an auction is on Kruse property, Baeke is confident attendance at the club’s events won’t be affected.
About 300 Auburns, Cords and Duesenbergs are expected for this year’s reunion events, and the club has been working to make itself more visible and open to the public.
This year, the club believes it has an ace in the hole with its emphasis on the Duesenberg. Every year, a specific marque and sometimes a specific model is celebrated; the last year of the mighty Duesenberg marque was 1984, when the club set a record for the number of Duesenbergs gathered in one place, Baeke said.
To draw Duesenbergs, the club created an unusual event for 2010: A Duesenberg drag race.
Baeke corrects himself: It’s not technically a “drag race.” The event will be Sept. 3 at the Kendallville airport, and to appease the Federal Aviation Administration, the club has renamed it an “exhibition of speed.”
“It’s a gentleman’s drag race,” Baeke said. “These are $2 million cars.”
A different auction
John Kruse is also hearkening back to an earlier day of classic-car craze in Auburn. The nephew of Dean Kruse, John Kruse formed Worldwide Auctioneers with Rod Egan in 2005.
Kruse International’s prominence in the collector car auction market of the 1970s and ’80s can’t be overstated, he said.
“You bought and sold an important car, you did it in Auburn,” he said.
But the market fragmented as more auction companies were created to focus on collector cars and consignors had more options.
Upon creating his company, John Kruse was careful to point out that it wasn’t meant as competition for his uncle. And since its launch in 2008, Worldwide’s Auburn Labor Day auction hasn’t looked much like the bidding action conducted by Kruse International.
The auction required a significant investment by serious bidders just for admission and a catalog and focused only on high-end vehicles, including a Ferrari that set a record for the most expensive sale in Auburn at $2.5 million, John Kruse said.
But that will change this year when Worldwide has a three-day sale of less-elite cars along with the usual high-end, 80-vehicle catalog auction Sept. 4.
Had Kruse International not lost its license, the Worldwide sale would have been competition. But John Kruse said the decision to expand the Labor Day sale was made at the request of interested sellers months before Kruse International lost its license.
He maintains, as he did five years ago, that the company’s goal is to restore Auburn’s reputation as the car lover’s mecca.
“We are committed to being in the collector car business in Auburn, Ind., for a long time,” he said. “I am glad that we did make that decision, because we’re going to have a great auction. We are going to be a reason for the buyers and sellers to come.”
Another new company, Classical Event Auctions, is planning a sale north of Auburn near DeKalb High School, where the Kruse auction had its roots.
President and owner Greg Peterson said about 250 vehicles have been committed to the three-day auction, which will include vendor booths and a car corral where owners can sell their own vehicles.
The similarity to Kruse’s auction is intentional, said Peterson, who grew up attending sales at Kruse Auction Park with his family.
“I know that’s where my passion grew out of,” he said. “That’s the flavor I like – open to kids and families.”
Optimism remains
Many in the Auburn area don’t care what draws car nuts to Auburn, as long as something gets them there.
Laura Brinkman is executive director of the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum, which counts on Labor Day to boost attendance and gift-store sales.
The classic car museum has benefited immeasurably over the years from Dean Kruse’s contributions, Brinkman said.
And while many people who attend the Kruse International auction never make it downtown for a museum visit or festival event, countless others do.
“We do have our eyes open, because it is a change,” she said.
But Brinkman is optimistic that the other events and auctions will be a draw and that cross-promotion will help get some of those visitors through the museum’s art deco galleries.
The ACD Festival’s volunteers draw visitors to the museum and downtown with an ever-growing list of events for all ages.
Organizer Beth Snow, like Brinkman, said she’s confident there will be an auction at Kruse Auction Park. But either way, the festival is expanding this year, and Snow foresees big crowds.
Only a drastic change in attendance would be noticeable, in any case; the festival does not have gates or keep attendance tallies.
A Friday night cruise-in in downtown Auburn – open to anyone who has a vehicle to show off – has drawn about 700 vehicles in recent years, so the festival has added another cruise-in night.
“It’s huge, and that’s why we’ve expanded it,” Snow said.
Yoder speculates that all the happenings will be enough to fill the city’s, and probably DeKalb County’s, hotel rooms and keep local restaurant tables filled.
Where the hurt might be felt is in neighboring counties that took on some of the Kruse International auction guests, especially Allen County hotels.
Maybe Auburn will evolve to look more like Scottsdale, Ariz., which holds several smaller collector car auctions in January, Yoder said.
“Is that good or bad? I don’t know,” Yoder said. “Change is one of those things that happens. You have to evolve and change.”
