[…] June 1937, which appeared in the September/October 2020 issue 306 of the SAH Journal, brought back many memories of the late Gordon Miller Buehrig (June 18, 1904 – January 22, 1990) who de- signed the 810 and 812 Cord during the years he was chief designer for the Auburn Automobile Company of Connersville, Indiana. My connection to Gordon Buehrig began one evening in the early 1970s when I received a phone call. The person on the other end of the call said something like “Mister Jackson, my name is Gordon Buehrig. You may not ever have heard of me, but I was chief designer for Auburn, Cord and Duesenberg.” I stopped him right there and said, “Mr. Buehrig, you might just as well said my name is Mickey Mantle, you may never have heard of me!” As the then-owner of a 1929 Auburn 8-120 seven passenger limo, I well knew who Gordon Buehrig was. Gordon went on to tell me he was writing his autobiography and had submitted some early efforts to L. Scott Bailey, publisher of Automobile Quarterly, who suggested he needed a writer to work with him and he had suggested me. At the time, I had left the editor- ship of Antique Automobile magazine (publication of the Antique Automobile Club of America) in June 1970 and one month later taken on the editorship of The Classic Car magazine (publication of the Classic Car Club of America). As I recall, I didn’t even ask him if I was going to be paid. I was simply over the moon that I would have the opportunity to work with probably the grea test designer of automobiles of what had come to be called “The Classic Era.” What followed was a two-year long-distance collaboration, with Gordon living in Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan, and me living in Hershey, Pennsylvania. There was no such thing as email or cell phones then, so it was totally by phone or U.S. Post Offi ce. Also, Gordon wintered in Sun City, Arizona, so that was added to the mix. We worked with Walter R. Haessner’s Haessner Publishing Company of Newfoundland, New Jersey, whom I had gotten to agree to publish the result of our efforts. I also contacted automotive artist John M. Peckham and he agreed to do two original paintings for the book, one of a 1936 Cord 810 sedan and one of Gordon’s design for a Duesenberg Model SJ Cabin Speedster (which was never built). I called on my friends Scott Bailey at Automobile Quarterly, John R. Bond at Road & Track, James J. Bradley at Detroit Public Library, Leslie R. Henry at The Henry Ford Museum, Henry Aus- tin Clark, Jr., at the Long Island Automotive Museum, David W. Brownell at Old Cars and Stan Yost, who had the Jeffrey Godshall Collection on Hupmobile Skylark and Graham Hollywood, who across the board responded with needed photographs. The result of two years of work was the 1975 publication of the book Rolling Sculpture: A Designer and His Work, 192 pages in Sources: b/w […]