The Auburn

My mother no longer remembers exactly when. But sometime after they married in June 1934 and before or soon after my birth in September 1935, my parents’ car broke down. They were visiting my mother’s family in Pensacola at the time. Jobs were scarce, and they had to get back to Panama City so my father could get to work the next day.

The earliest job I remember my father having was at the old ice plant. Nothing is there now, the property is vacant, but in the middle 1930s there was an ice plant way back behind Paul Brent Gallery, between West Beach Drive and the bay, where platted but unpaved Mercer Avenue curves around and ends. In my earliest memory my mother and I went to the ice plant to pick up my father from work. Then the Great Depression, he was being paid seven dollars a week and glad to get it.

When their car broke down in Pensacola, my parents left it someplace to be repaired, perhaps Pensacola Buggy Works, the old Chevrolet dealership and garage. Having two cars, my grandparents lent them a car to drive home to Panama City. It was an Auburn sedan.

From the time of his first Maxwell touring car in the early 1920s until his death in 1976, my grandfather Walter Henry Gentry drove nothing but Chrysler cars. Maxwells, then when Walter P. Chrysler took over, Chrysler, Plymouth, DeSoto. But one year, as the story was told to me, a friend from whom he bought cars moved to selling Auburns. My grandfather bought one. It would have been 1934 or 1935.

My mother is having difficulty communicating, but she remembers old times, and so to have a conversation with her yesterday I asked her again about cars, specifically about the Auburn. It was a sedan, maroon and cherry red, she said, a beautiful car. Two-tone cars in those days generally had the body painted one color and the fenders painted the other color. Dark maroon fenders and a cherry red body. Love of red cars is imprinted upon my soul, which tells me that I may have been along on the trip that time my parents’ Chevrolet broke down in Pensacola and they borrowed my grandfather’s Auburn to drive home to Panama City.

That trip home in the Auburn nearly put my parents in the poor house. The story was told to me many times during my growing up years: the Auburn got six miles per gallon. A hundred miles from Pensacola to Panama City at six miles per gallon equals seventeen gallons. Times perhaps ten cents per gallon, equals a dollar seventy. That was a hefty chunk out of seven dollars a week salary. Plus, they had to drive it back to Pensacola the following weekend.

Soon after that, my parents bought a new Chevrolet, a 1935 Master DeLuxe coach (two door sedan) from my father’s Bay High School classmate Bubber Nelson. This was not it:

Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg stopped making the Auburn with the 1936 model year. As my mother remembered yesterday, it was a beautiful car.

Wodenstag.

Tom