Museum owner built a private Indiana paradise he designed for beloved backwoods.

Inside Dean Kruse’s wallet is a packet of photos half an inch thick of his two adopted sons, one now a teen and the other a grade schooler. He’s teaching them to drive an MG Midget, a Mini Moke, and a Citroën 2CV (the actual Austin Powers movie car), which are parked among hundreds of wood carvings, models, toys, and video screens in one of his home garages.

Kruse’s father grew up on a farm in Indiana, and often heard the roar of the Auburn Automobile Company’s test drivers barreling down the dirt road in front of their home in fabulous Auburns and Cords. Test driver Ab Jenkins made sure that each car left the Auburn assembly line having lived up to its dash plaque certifying that it reached 100 mph, Kruse’s father told his son.

Kruse’s father told stories of Auburn test drivers, who also tested the airplanes that fascinated sales genius Errett Lobban Cord who owned two airlines until 1932. One day a test driver named Bill Simmons crashed one of Cord’s airplanes into the wheat field next to Kruse’s family farm, setting the wheat on fire and destroying the crop. Simmons walked away with just scratches, but Cord had to pay the wheat farmer for the lost crop. Part of E.L. Cord’s company was engine maker Lycoming in Pennsylvania, which was started by building engines for the cars, and today powers more than half of the world’s fleet of general aviation aircraft, helicopters included.

Dean Kruse grew up with these success stories: Living just down the road from where the Auburn Automobile Company grew into a conglomerate of engines and performance luxury cars, he heard all the stuff that wasn’t jotted into the official corporate histories of the AAC, the legendary maker of Auburns, Cords and Duesenbergs, America’s finest automobiles ever.

After the Depression, all that remained of the magnificent Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg empire was a museum, but Kruse remembers growing up with people who had worked at the factory. “I still think that the Auburns, Cords, and Duesenbergs have never been duplicated,” says Kruse, who runs an enormous auction business for classic cars in Auburn, Indiana. “There are still some Duesenberg records out at Bonneville Salt Flats that haven’t been beaten. Some endurance records still stand. A Duesenberg could do 90 mph almost idling, and it could do that forever.”

“I grew into the auction business because the ACD museum is here,” says Kruse. “I’ve been involved since 1971. The ACD festival was losing money every year, only about five to six thousand dollars. They asked my dad and I if we could have a donation auction to raise the money each year. But my dad asked ‘Why don’t we just sell the cars.’ So we got a list of all the ACD owners, sent a letter and told them we were going to have an auction, and we ended up with 71 cars.” When the owners and their friends came to the 10,000-population town of Auburn, “the crowds were so big they ate the town out of food. Big traffic jams. We knew were on to something,” Kruse recalls.

The late Tom Barrett, one of the founders of the massive Barrett-Jackson auction extravaganza, originally hired Kruse to help out in the budding days of Barrett’s auction company, and Kruse brought that experience back to Auburn, where these days every Labor Day 100,000 people flock to the annual Kruse auction bash, alongside about 125,000 privately invited car owners are doing the same thing at the Auburn Cord Duesenberg museum complex.

Built 10 years ago, Dean Kruse’s log garage used to house a bevy of Duesenbergs, but Kruse has moved them to his public museum (“They drive like trucks”). At his home garage now he keeps three six-wheel Mercedes that Adolph Hitler used for his personal entourage, next to four cute unrestored Studebakers and an Auburn supercharged boattail roadster, as well as his kids’ cars. His favorite drivers are a Ferrari and a Jaguar. One of his barns has 75 restored tractors, and the main log garage will hold about 70 cars, although he doesn’t put that many inside because it makes it too hard to walk among them. The massive log garage, which overlooks a 40-acre man-made lake, and the other two garages, guest home, and office are impossibly large, but use this as a guide: They contain 37 bathrooms, and seven bars. And Kruse does not even drink.