The annual Glenmoor Gathering of Significant Automobiles is noted for its display of classic cars, each with its own story.
But some cars have bigger stories than others. That should be evident Sunday, the third and final day of the event at Canton’s Glenmoor Country Club. A 1937 supercharged Auburn Cord 812 will be on display — the Cord in which cowboy star Tom Mix died.
Mix was famous in the early years of movies and in his own touring shows.
“His movies don’t have a lot of violence in them,” said Bob White, now the owner of Mix’s Cord. “He never smoked. He very seldom shot anybody. So he was the ‘white hat’ at the time. And all the kids at the time loved Tom Mix.” White still admires “his morals onscreen, that I felt was very interesting and something lacking today. … He was a good person for the children of that era.”
In 1940, Mix accidentally crashed the car; a metal suitcase flying from the back seat fatally broke his neck.
The car by itself is a rare classic. White, a former Chicago entrepreneur, says only 196 of this Cord model were made over two years. Paul E. Mix, a distant relation and biographer of Tom, said in one book that the car cost Mix $3,000, “an extraordinary sum of money” in its day, and had a top speed of 110 miles per hour.
“It had a lot of innovations, like front-wheel drive and roll-out headlights,” said White. “It was really an interesting car. And Tom Mix took the spare tire out of the trunk and had it mounted on the trunk of the car, and there are only three of those that were ever made.”
And this Cord has its connection to Mix, who was so big that a radio show about his fictional exploits ran for years after his death. White hopes the car showing at Glenmoor will convey Mix’s style and star power thanks to the roughly $600,000 he has spent buying and restoring the car.
White came to the car somewhat indirectly, starting as he grew up near Oklahoma’s 101 Ranch, a famous spread whose cowboys also put on Wild West shows. Mix worked on the 101 and took part in its shows before his movie stardom.
“I had always collected the 101 Ranch things and was always really interested in them,” said White, 61, who is especially fond of the old 101 posters. He has also long admired Cords, buying his first in 1971, as well as other classic cars.
“When Tom Mix’s Cord came up” for sale, White said, “it was like divine intervention.”
“We bought it at an auction in Missouri and then brought it straight to Kansas, to Stan Gilliland,” a well-known restorer of Cords, White said. “It’s been a frame-off restoration going on for about a year and a half.”
In one of his books, Paul Mix notes that the car underwent its first restoration in 1943, a year after being bought by mechanic Raymond Nelson. It passed through other owners (including Nelson again) and other work, though White said much of that was less than thorough.
“It looked really well from about 10 yards, 20 yards,” he said. “But the car had never been repaired properly [after the wreck]. There was still a lot of damage. … It had been superficially restored a couple of times, three times, over the years, [but] this is the only frame-off that took it back to new-car condition.”
On top of that, White said the aim was to make the car look the way it did when Mix owned it in 1940.
“Our biggest challenge has been determining what it looked like in 1940 and then reproducing those parts, because everything had to be handmade,” White said. “Finding suitcases like he had took a year and a half. So many parts had to be made from scratch, like the license plate covers that had ‘Tom Mix’ on them.”
A lot of time was spent in photo archives, library searches and in Gilliland’s library, to get the details right. Memorabilia was also borrowed from the Tom Mix Museum in Oklahoma and duplicated for the car.
Finally, earlier this week, White was waiting for the car to roll out — and his first chance to drive it before bringing it to Ohio in a custom-made, enclosed trailer.
Not that Jackson Township is its only stop. After the Glenmoor appearance, White said, “it comes to Oklahoma to the 101 Ranch museum and a show there, then another show at the Tom Mix Museum in Oklahoma, then back to Kansas for another car show. Then we head home for a few days, then go to California for a Cord meet. … This car will tour a lot for the next year. I probably won’t launch another project until ’12, although I’m going to write a book on this whole process.”
And other cars are being restored: “My father’s ’28 Model A, that he was the second owner of. … We’re just finishing that up. And then we have a 1934 British Riley racing car that we have a few tweaks on.”
So how many cars does White have? “Not more than maybe 10 or 12,” he said. “There are guys that have hundreds, you know. I enjoy driving my cars, and I don’t want to have too many because you don’t get to drive them like you’d like to. You should. They need to be driven.”
Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and in the HeldenFiles Online blog at http://heldenfels.ohio.com and on Facebook and on Twitter. He also does a weekly video chat for Ohio.com. He can be reached at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.