Auctions are wonderful opportunities to dream, and we all need our dreams. We must believe that dreams can come true and so when deciding which one car to buy at the 7th annual Auburn Auction held by Worldwide Auctioneers on Saturday August 30th in Auburn, Indiana (Labor Day weekend) we are faced with a difficult decision.
One man whose dream came true is Virgil Sciolaro who always admired his brother’s Auburn and so one day in 1945, he took out a chattel mortgage for $200 and bought a 1935 Auburn 851 SC Boattail Speedster. He was only 18, but he had eyes for a girl called Delores Sayers and his new car helped his courting. Whether it was the throaty burble of the 4.5 litre supercharged Lycoming straight 8, or the oh-so-stylish body lines, or Virgil’s own charm which won Delores but they married in 1948 and went on honeymoon in the Auburn thus naming it the ‘Honeymoon Auburn’.
Lot 38 is a 1938 Talbot-Lago T-23 Sport Cabriolet with rare and fabulous coachwork by Figoni & Falaschi. The race-bred four-litre inline six transmits its 140 horsepower through a Wilson competition pre-selector gearbox offering you just over 120 mph. We confess our preference for the Talbot, but if we are out-bid we will have missed the chance to buy the Auburn in Lot 17. But enough dreaming – there are plenty of other exquisite cars on offer. Lot 55 is a 1934 Packard Twelve 1108 Convertible Sedan sporting aristocratic custom coachwork by Dietrich in vivid two-tone green and black canvas top.
The catalogue entry describes its 7 litre 160 H.P. V12 engine, three-speed selective synchromesh gearbox with vacuum-assisted clutch and brakes. In 1934 America was in the throes of the great depression but Packard threw caution to the wind and offered a dazzling choice of 55 different models and the select models designed by Dietrich had price tags double those of standard models. If this one is too expensive, the auction offers 17 other Packards.
There are just two Cords however, a 1929 Cord L-29 Town Car and a 1931 Cord L-29 Convertible Sedan. They both have 4.8 litre straight eight Lycomings, three-speed gearboxes and hydraulic brakes but the surprise is their front wheel drive – a remarkable feat of engineering for a car of its day. The town car’s 1929 owner transferred the body from his Minerva and it has retained its wonderful patina to this day.
There are 189 lots of automobilia offered before the cars including a Circa 1948 Schwinn Whizzer Gasoline Motorbike – it’s all in the name, as we found out with the owners of the Honeymoon Auburn.
(Text Robin Batchelor, picture courtesy Worldwide Auctions.)