Chicago contrarian’s classics get prime accommodations

Phil Kuhn was nervous the first time he drove his 1932 Duesenberg J Murphy-bodied dual-cowl phaeton. “It’s a big car, I thought, what if it breaks down?” he recalls saying to himself. Kuhn bought the car because he made himself a promise. “I told myself that by the time I’m 50 I want a Duesenberg. I started to do my homework on it, made sure you have to look at the firewall and the chassis, I wanted a good one. I had a picture of this car hanging up in my garage for a year before I bought it. Now the Kruse auction brochure has my car on it.”

It’s not Kuhn’s only Duesey these days, either. “Max Baer’s son, junior, (he was Jethro on TV. He’s building a casino in Carson City), he had the ’38 that I just bought.”

Kuhn is also looking for more cars than the two Duesenbergs, the Packards, the Auburns, the Ferraris, and the new Ford GT he now owns. “I don’t have faith in the stock market,” says Kuhn, a public auction company owner in Chicago. “You can’t control it. I want to build barns and garages and have a portfolio of cars that I can control and enjoy. It’s my niche.”

Kuhn’s father encouraged him and his six siblings to tinker with cars as kids, and when he grew up Kuhn got a job at a Mercedes dealership in Chicago. He noticed that traders from the nearby Chicago Board of Trade made up an abnormal percentage of cash buyers at the dealership, and in the mid-1980’s he decided becoming a commodities trader would be the best route to support his addiction to cars. After ten years as a trader, he got bored. “I had nine cars at my house in the suburbs, and I took a train to work everyday. I thought, ‘There’s something wrong with this picture,’” he recalls.

So he developed a plan to work with cars daily — his favorites are postwar sports cars and prewar American classics such as Packards, Auburns and Cords  —  with the ultimate goal of getting a special, one-of-a-kind Duesenberg. He set about looking for a high-quality restored example, and eventually bought the famed 2004 Pebble Beach-winning 1932 Murphy-bodied Duesenberg dual-cowl Phaeton from former Lionel Trains chairman Richard Kughn in Detroit.

To become a successful trader, Kuhn had studied group psychology. “I became a contrarian,” he explains. “When everyone is doing one thing, I want to look around and do something else. In the early 1980s, Merrill Lynch had an ad in Time saying this was the best time to buy bonds. But that was the height of the bond market; they went south for the next ten years.” A few years ago Kuhn remembers seeing an article in the Wall Street Journal about Duesenbergs dropping in value. “I said to myself, ‘This is the time to buy.’”

To escape the Board of Trade, Kuhn started a company auctioning everyday cars to the public every Wednesday night and Saturday, after the Salvation Army in 1998 had asked him if he could sell the donated cars that were stockpiling at the charity’s headquarters. Until 2005 he grew the auction company largely because tax rules allowed market-value deductions from the donation of a car to charity, instead of what the car actually sold for at auction. So supply boomed. Even after the tax rules changed, Kuhn’s auction remains popular. And it allows him to take time off and visit his 16 cars at his log garage on the shore of Lake Michigan two hours north of his home. “Sometimes I don’t go to the office; I drive straight up here and work.”

It’s no wonder: One of the cars in the classic section of his recent log-cabin garage is an Auburn 12-cylinder Salon cabriolet, a 1934 that isn’t quite as art deco as the eight-cylinder models, and has more chrome trim. “This is awesome, I just love the look of this car.” Kuhn searched for this car, and found one for sale in Colorado, but a friend of his beat him to it. He discovered there were only three in the country, and luckily found one for sale in Seattle. “I bought it on the spot. What’s really cool is that it has a ‘Startix’ system, so if you stall it, it starts on its own.”

He’s also got a 1937 Packard convertible sedan with 24,000 original miles, the headlights of which he’s searching for at swap meets to turn into exterior lights for his garage. Next to it is a 1937 Packard 12-cylinder LeBaron town car, and both Packards have recently been restored.

Classics are not Kuhn’s only interests: “This is a 1967 Lotus model 51, I restored it and I’m planning to take it vintage racing.” He’s researched it, however, and knows the close proximity of the exhaust pipes on that year grand prix car can burn the driver if he’s not careful. Ferraris also interest Kuhn, who drives them all regularly.

He finished building the log garage in 2004, followed by an adjacent log home on a private beach in 2006. The structure is designed to house his full-size motorhome inside during the winter behind a tall overhead door, but during driving weather he leaves it outside so he can more easily play with the cars inside.

There’s a movie screen at one end of the motorhome stall — Kuhn loves car movies. In particular he remembers “Macon County Line”, which starred Max Baer Jr. “There were some great cars in that movie,” he says.

Kuhn’s method is to buy only what he likes. “I’m really driven by speculation; it’s like my Smith Barney account: I look at my cars at 2 year intervals and see if I can sell them for more. I’ve sold more and more stocks and bought cars instead.”

If there’s a flaw in his financial plan, however, it’s that Kuhn is not completely objective about his investments: “The guy I bought this ‘32 Packard Phaeton from had it 30 years. He bought it when he was 50 and sold it to me when he was 80. Unfortunately he passed away a few weeks after he sold it to me. Now I’m 50 and I feel like I have to keep it 30 years.”