Car of the Week: 1933 Auburn Salon Speedster

Editor’s note: Joel Nystrom brought his 1933 Auburn Twelve Salon Speedster to the 2026 Iola Car Show, where we caught up with him. His Auburn Twelve Salon Speedster is one of just 14 such cars built and one of five known to survive. In interviewing Nystrom for an article on his Salon Speedster, we found the story behind the largely unrestored car’s past and his efforts to preserve it were ideally shared from his perspective.

In the ’90s, I started trying to find one, but they were hard to find and they seemed to be out of my price range. But during that time, I started buying books to study the Auburn and learn as much as I could. I ended up learning the whole Auburn, Cord and Duesenberg story, and decided that I was going to someday get myself a Duesenberg, a Cord and an Auburn and have all three. I started down that path, and in 2009, I bought the Duesenberg, and then in 2019 I bought the Cord, and then the last piece of the puzzle was to find an Auburn.

At that time, I thought since the most common Speedster is the eight-cylinder, that’s probably what I was going to get. But as time went by and the more I thought about it, I thought, “Why not try to get the Twelve?” They’re certainly more rare, and I think they look a little nicer because the hood is longer than on an eight-cylinder Auburn.

There are reproduction Speedsters and non-authentic ones where somebody bought a complete eight-cylinder Speedster and a twelve-cylinder sedan and swapped the bodies; those Speedsters are less than half the price of an authentic one, and much easier to find. I was thinking about going that route, but I talked to John Shibles when I met him, and he said, “No, don’t do that. Just keep waiting. Wait and save and be patient — you’ll get the right one. 

It will come along. If you get a non-authentic one, you’ll be off the market when the right one comes along. Just wait.” And so I waited and I found out about this Twelve Speedster, and I ended up with it. 

I knew about this car; it had been in a museum since 1966. A friend of mine knew the family that owned the museum. The owner of the museum, Paul Kelsey, passed away in 1998, and they closed the museum at that time, but all the cars just remained there. A friend of mine was trying to line me up to buy it, but they weren’t ready to sell and they wouldn’t talk to me.

Eventually he called me and said, “Well, good news, you can buy the Auburn. The bad news is, you gotta go to an auction to buy it.” I was able to go to the auction in 2024 and was the high bidder.

One thing I really like about this Speedster is its documentation. The car was bought in 1935 by a guy named John Zutz, from Keister, Minn. And when he bought it, one of the first things he did was put on new running board covers and new running board metal trim that he ordered right from Auburn, and he kept the receipt. 

He ordered a handful of other parts right from Auburn, and he kept all the receipts and they’re all still with the car. So, it’s documented all the way back to 1936, with those receipts of January of 1936. He kept the car until 1966 when he sold it to Paul Kelsey for his museum in Albert Lea, Minn. 

The Kelsey family and other people that I talked to who knew the family said that since Keister is close to Albert Lea, that Kelsey became aware of the car because of its proximity of his location. He started trying to buy it off of Zutz back in the ’40s. Well, Zutz would never sell the until 1966. They also told me that Zutz was a farmer and businessman, and he took his winters off and would go to California. He apparently got to know Clark Gable before Gable was a star, and because of that, he visited him sometimes while in California. Zutz claimed that this was Clark Gable’s car from the time it was new, and when he heard in 1935 that Gable was trading it into the dealer, he went to the dealer and bought it, knowing that it would be something special, because Gable was a star by then. And that’s one of the reasons Zutz took good care of it, didn’t drive it much and preserved it until he sold it in 1966. It only has 20,000 miles on it. And, of course, the museum didn’t drive it much. It would sit in the museum most of the time with a picture of Clark Gable on it, so it still has only 20,000 miles. 

I don’t have any proof or documentation of the Clark Gable story, but I think it sounds plausible. And I don’t want to claim that it’s true, because I don’t know that. But I’d sure be interested to find out if anybody knows anything. 

It was repainted in 1968, and they also did some chrome work on it. The original leather upholstery was all in place, but after about 10 times of getting in and out of it, the seat started tearing up, because this old leather is so brittle. And since then, some of the paint has been falling off. 

Mechanically, it needed help. It didn’t start, and the auction company couldn’t get it running. The brakes didn’t work. So, I basically bought a non-running car and had it delivered home. I rebuilt the carburetors and fuel pump and cleaned out the fuel system, and I completely went through the hydraulic system on the brakes and rebuilt the cylinders and rebuilt the master cylinder. Interestingly enough, I had just rebuilt the hydraulic brake system on my wife’s ’61 Corvette, and when I took apart the Auburn master cylinder and was wondering where I’d ever find parts, I realized that it was almost internally identical to the Corvette’s master cylinder. 

So, I bought another ’61 Corvette rebuild kit and was able to use the parts out of that to rebuild the Auburn master cylinder. 

There was no spark to start the car, so I took apart the Startix and cleaned the contacts inside of that. It turned out there were multiple problems contributing to it not starting. 

The car has two coils, two sets of points — basically, there are two separate ignition systems to operating — one for each bank of the engine. On one side, where one of the wires goes into the distributor, the insulation was wore through, and it was grounded out. And the other one was worn through to barely have continuity, and the ignition switch itself made contact intermittently. So, I had to do a lot of fixing one thing, and find it still didn’t work, and then keep searching and finding other problems, so that was kind of a major project. It was finally resolved to have spark on both sides of the engine, and it had a bad distributor rotor or two. 

I also drained out all the fluids and replaced them, and since the car had been sitting so long, I was concerned about the inside of the engine being dried out from not having any oil on the internal parts. 

I put oil in each cylinder through the spark plug holes and I pulled off the oil pan, inspected the inside, and sprayed oil on the cam, and everywhere else I could get at. Once it was lubricated as best I could, I put it back together with a new pan gasket and started it up once I got it to that point. It didn’t make any weird noises and still seems to be running good and in very good shape. 

Once I had it running, I found that the exhaust head pipes leak, and they’re covered with an asbestos wrap, so you can’t really see them. So far, I have one of them taken off, and welded patches over all the holes, and put it back together and put the asbestos back on it, but I need to do the other side. 

I plan to get new pipes, but there’s a 12-week lead time to get pipes, and it’s the time of year when I want to be out having some fun with the car. Since I didn’t want to have exhaust blowing out all over the place, I just patched them up for now. 

I had it so I could drive it by June of 2025, but I hadn’t completely gone through the brakes. 

They were extremely sketchy, so I only drove it just a little bit. By September of 2025, I had the brakes sorted and could drive it up to a show that was about five or six miles from home. 

When I got to the auction to buy the Speedster, I looked it over. I’d already researched it, so I knew it was a legitimate Auburn Twelve Salon Speedster, but I looked it over really well before deciding that I really was going to do everything I could to buy it. And then when I opened up the top well, I saw there was no top, no irons, no bows, nothing. It was all gone. I asked the auctioneers about it, and they said they weren’t aware of it ever having a top, but they checked with the Kelsey family, who was selling the car. The family said it never had a top since it’s been in the museum, but I bought it anyway. 

I started collecting parts to reproduce a top for the Speedster and bought some reproduction irons and hired a guy who was going to steam bend some bows. Then I started communicating with the family members over email and asked them that if they found any documents connected to the car while cleaning out the museum to please contact me. They found a picture of the museum from 1980 that showed a bunch of the cars all sitting there, and there was the Auburn with the top. They said, “Well, now we’re gonna have to find the top.” 

Inside the museum, there was a little building internal to the museum that had a flat top on it that wasn’t as high as the rest of the inside of the building. They found the top assembly laying on top of that little bathroom building, and it was complete with the irons and the bows and the canvas and the back window — everything. I’ve researched it and it appears to be the original top from when the car was built, still in good shape. 

I drove down to Missouri to pick up the top and meet with the family to learn a lot more about the car and the museum. Then the question became, has the canvas on this top been replaced? I have talked to some people who know these Auburn Speedsters really well, and they said if it has this certain kind of special cloth around the header bowl, it’s probably original. 

And I looked, and it still has that cloth. Plus, both Zutz and Kelsey kept all the receipts with the car that include everything they bought, and there’s no receipts for a top.

In 1933, the Auburn was available in three levels, the standard, the Custom and the Salon. The Salon was very well equipped. It had a two-speed rear end. It had Free Wheeling in the transmission, and vacuum power-assisted brakes. There’s a knob on the dash where you can select the amount of power to the brakes, and the knob is labeled “dry, wet, snow, or ice,” so it’s almost like an early anti-lock brake system. It has a cutout where pulling up a knob up on the floor opens the valve in the back of the mufflers so the exhaust flows straight through. 

Other features of the Salon are a different grille, different headlamp lenss, different fenders that are more cut back and sweep back from the front. There’s polished stainless steel trim around the whole perimeter of the fenders and on the running boards and hood louvers. The Salon also has chrome wheels and a more rigid frame with an A frame added under the engine to give a better ride. The Salon also has a wider tread with wider axles — there’s a lot of differences that you wouldn’t attribute to just a trim level. 

The Salon also has a synchromesh transmission with a different part number than the standard or the Custom. It also has different carburetors that are unique to the Salon model, and a different throttle linkage. It also has an electrolock ignition where there’s an armored cable coming from the distributor to the ignition switch. 

When you turn this ignition switch off, it grounds the points, so even if somebody were to hot wire it, it wouldn’t start, because the points are grounding. 

I’m planning to show it and drive it and enjoy it. 

I don’t plan to repaint it. I am going to reupholster the seat, but not the door panels. The seat is too far gone. I really hate to re-upholster it, because I want to preserve the car as much as possible. I want to replace as few parts as I have to, and be in preservation mode with the car. People may ask, “Why preserve this paint job when it’s not original and it’s flaking off, and it has a lot of problems?” But I don’t think I can just paint the car; I couldn’t stop at that. Sure, if I’m going to go so far as to paint it, then I’d have to restore it. And then what would I do with it? I’d be afraid to drive it. I have no aspirations to compete in concours-level stuff. I’m not that meticulous and fastidious, and I’d rather have driver quality that I don’t have to spend 48 hours cleaning before I go to a show. I’ll get it good and then go. Maybe the next guy will restore it, maybe not. I don’t know. But the 20,000 miles, I believe, is actual. Looking at everything on the car, underneath and everywhere else, I really believe that that’s the true mileage. And I just don’t think I should restore a 20,000 mile car, even if it is almost 100 years old. 

To me, it’s still too good to restore. As an example, I had to take off part of the exhaust pipe. Where the pipe bolts to the manifold. Usually on an old car, when you’re going to take one of those off, you’re going to plan on a major battle. Right? Soaking it, heating it, maybe breaking off a stud. I put a 9/16-in. wrench on those nuts, gave them a little nudge, and they came right off. The same thing where the exhaust pipe connected to the muffler. The bolt loosened right up, the clamp loosened up, and the pipe pulled right out of the muffler. I didn’t need to pound on it. Nothing. It’s unbelievable. It’s like working on a car that’s 2 years old. In some of those regards, that’s the way it has been working on it, everything on it is just easy. There’s nothing stuck and rusted together like an old car usually is. In light of all that, I just don’t think I should restore it. 

Joel Nystrom’s 1933 Twelve Salon Speedster will be among the Auburns present at this year’s Auburn Cord Duesenberg Club Reunion and ACD Festival in Auburn, Ind., from Sept. 3-6.

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