By The River

I'm on vacation in the Midwest with my wife and daughters, and yesterday we visited the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Museum in Auburn, Indiana. It is a collection of about a hundred of the sort of automobiles most people have only seen in movies. They were built here in Auburn for wealthy Americans, mainly in the 1920s and 1930s, and are among the most beautiful automobiles of all time. The museum is housed in the Art Deco former corporate headquarters of the Auburn company, which went out of business in 1937.

You gaze upon these automobiles--calling them "cars" seems inappropriate--and envision the Jazz Age and the world created by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. If Jay Gatsby didn't have one of these, he certainly wanted one. E.L. Cord, the salesman CEO who made the Auburn company what it was, knew how to create visually appealing automobiles.

Touring this museum was an education. I've always known that Detroit was not the only place in America where automobiles were built in the early 20th century, but didn't realize that Indiana had dozens of auto manufacturers. Some didn't stay in business very long, but others, like Auburn and Studebaker, were around for quite awhile. Many American children grew up in the 1950s and 1960s believing that Henry Ford invented the automobile, that most quintessentially American of inventions. In fact, Ford was merely among the more successful of many inventors of the auto the world over, all at about the same time.

Auburn, Indiana, is about 20 miles south of Interstate 80, and maybe 15 miles north of Fort Wayne. Like many old manufacturing centers of the Midwest, it is trying to find a new way in the 21st century.