Glenn Pray Lost Everything to Keep Auburns and Cords Alive

What do all of these things have in common?

• The Low Volume Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Act that allows the sale of up to 325 vehicles per year that are replicas of cars built at least 25 years ago
• High-dollar “continuation” series production of legendary historic models from Jaguar, Aston-Martin, Bentley, and Land Rover by their respective factories
• Pur Sang’s recreation of the Bugatti 35, which is so accurate that owners of real Bugatti 35s use its engine to go vintage racing
• The Veyron, Ferdinand Piëch’s ego exercise in reviving the original Bugatti brand.
• Restomods—classics from the ’60s through the ’90s that are upgraded with modern drivetrains, brakes, suspension, and creature comforts
• GT40s built by Superformance and Race Car Replicas, along with copper and aluminum Cobras from David Kirkham

One could argue that none of those things would exist if it were not for Glenn Pray, an industrial arts schoolteacher from Oklahoma. In the early 1960s, he got the idea to buy a factory full of new-old-stock parts and ended up successfully reviving not just one, but two storied automobile brands.

While Pray’s company wasn’t successful by the standard of other automotive startups like Tesla—he ended up making hundreds, rather than thousands, of cars—collectors continue to value his vehicles, and they fetch as much as six-figure prices at auction. Pray also established a successful family business keeping classic cars on the road that is now into the family’s fourth generation.

Speaking of generations, that’s part of the phrase Pray used to identify the vehicles he built under those two revived brands, Cords and Auburn. Although Pray is often regarded as the first maker of replicars, he avoided the term, because he associated it with cheap knockoffs. Pray’s “second generation” Cords and Auburns had more than just an air of authenticity, largely because Pray’s Auburn Cord Duesenberg Company, which continues to operate in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, is the direct corporate descendant of the automotive trinity originally founded by E. L. Cord in Auburn, Indiana.

When Cord saw the writing on the wall and shut down the automotive part of his industrial and commercial empire in the late 1930s, the body tooling was sold off to Hupp. Other assets, including the Auburn Cord Duesenberg headquarters in Auburn, Indiana, and its inventory of spare parts were purchased by Dallas Winslow, a businessman from Michigan, who continued to sell parts to owners of those marques. Collectors referred to Winslow’s operations as “the factory.”

Glenn Pray didn’t grow up in the corporate world, or even the industrial one; he was raised on a farm in Colorado. He showed mechanical aptitude early on, building his own car out of junked Model T parts as a teenager. He followed his brother into the Marines during World War II, only to get a medical discharge due to a flareup of rheumatic fever. When an aptitude test at the VA said he’d be a good shop teacher, he used his veterans’ benefits to complete a four-year course for industrial arts teachers in just two years.

Pray started teaching shop at Tulsa Central High School in 1952. Having fallen in love with the 1936–37 Cords from the first time he saw one before the war, he tasked his students with finding one for him. Surprisingly, they actually located a ’37 Cord Supercharged Phaeton—in Tulsa. The car was in pretty rough shape, but Pray managed to restore it, and it became his daily driver. The ’37 Supercharged Phaeton was the first of a dozen Cords he would acquire over the next few years. In the process, Pray became an expert on the marque and an active part of the Cord collector community.

Glenn Pray’s “aw shucks” manner rather obscured the fact that he was a very smart, clever, and ambitious businessman. In 1960, Pray got word that Dallas Winslow was interested in selling the Auburn Cord factory in Auburn, Indiana, along with a warehouse full of OEM Auburn, Cord, and Duesenberg parts. Pray inquired about the price for the parts and intellectual property rights: $75,000, Winslow told him. That might not sound like much today, but adjusted for inflation, it’s nearly $800,000—well beyond the means of a public school shop teacher. Even so, Pray scheduled a meeting in Auburn to negotiate the purchase. To put on a good front, Pray asked a friend with a Lincoln Continental to drive him to Indiana. The driver’s side of the Continental had been damaged in a crash, but they figured they’d simply keep that side of the car out of Winslow’s view. For gas money, Pray borrowed funds from the school’s parent-teacher association. As he didn’t have money for even the cheapest motel for himself and his friend, they drove non-stop in both directions.

Not only did Pray persuade Winslow to agree to sell him the inventory of parts, but he also convinced the wealthy businessman to finance the deal. Pray sold his beloved ’37 Phaeton to make the down payment.

Pray struggled to raise money to pay off the loan, but while selling an L-29 Cord at an auction, he met a wealthy Chevy dealer and collector named Wayne McKinley, who agreed to back the venture in exchange for a 49 percent share of the company. Using one truck belonging to the dealership and another that McKinley arranged to borrow from one of his customers to use on the weekends, Pray transported 700,000 pounds of parts—in their original wooden bins—from Auburn to a ramshackle former pickle factory in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, that Pray had leased and minimally repaired. 

Pray had some rough times after acquiring all of those new-old-stock parts and even took loans from customers in exchange for the promise of parts in the future. In July of 1961, the company barely took in $200, but things eventually turned around. By the mid-1960s, the company was grossing between $6000 and $8000 a month in parts sales. To promote those sales Pray offered customers “factory” tours. When stocks of NOS parts dwindled, Pray had accurate reproductions produced.

Having achieved more stable financial footing, Pray embarked on an effort to revive the Cord brand with an all-new automobile. He enlisted the help of Gordon Buehrig, who designed the original Cord 810/812 and was working for Ford Motor Company. Pray’s original concept was a modern car with styling cues from the 1930s Cords, but Buehrig convinced him that a retro design closer to the original would likely be more successful. 

Buehrig sculpted a 1/8 scale clay model in his home studio that looked very much like a Cord 810, only about 20 percent smaller and with a slightly different rear end. Playing on the model number of the original, ’36 Cord, and the fact that the new car would be about 80 percent the size of the original, Pray decided to name his new car the Cord 8/10 Sportsman.

When Beuhrig informed Henry Ford II of his side project, the chairman of the giant automaker indicated that he had nothing against Pray but that he didn’t want Buehrig’s name to be associated with the revived Cord, and he wouldn’t let Pray have access to the dimensions or drawings of the model Buehrig had made. Buehrig did, however, let Pray take detailed photographs of the model. The final styling and shaping of a full-sized clay model was done by Stanley Bromm who had worked with Buehrig at Ford and had been chief modeler of the classic 1956 Continental Mark II.

Bromm got involved because he was then working as a designer for the consumer and industrial products division of the U.S. Rubber Company, later renamed Uniroyal. The tire maker had developed a new composite body material named Royalite to compete with fiberglass. Royalite was a sandwich made of two sheets of solid ABS plastic and a core of ABS foam. When heated to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, the foam would expand and the solid sheets would soften, allowing the Royalite to be vacuum- or blow-molded into shape. Despite the fact that the material was highly resistant to impacts and dents, U.S. Rubber had had only modest success marketing the material and was looking for more publicity.

Gordon Buehrig was then in charge of researching alternative materials at Ford and one of the ones they had tested was Royalite. Serendipitously, in the summer of 1963, George Callum, the head of U.S. Rubber’s plastics division, happened to call Buehrig when Pray was in his office. Buehrig acted as a matchmaker. Callum quickly realized that the revival of the storied Cord brand was exactly the kind of publicity Royalite needed. After some meetings at U.S. Royal’s headquarters in Indiana, the company made Pray the proverbial offer he couldn’t refuse. U.S. Royal would not only cover the cost of producing the molds and tooling necessary to make Cord bodies, potentially Pray’s largest expense, it would also have Bromm sculpt the full-size clay model from which they pulled the molds. 

In production, the front and rear clips were molded as one piece, later to be separated at the Oklahoma factory. U.S. Rubber wanted to be able to nest the bodies for more efficient shipment so Bromm initially gave the panels some “draft,” which would also make it easier to release the body parts from the molds. Pray, however, was adamant that the Cord’s tucked-under lower panels should remain, and they did.

U.S. Royal committed to supplying 100 bodies. It also took on much of the promotional load for the car, even publishing a brochure titled “The Indestructible Cord” and demonstrating Royalite’s durability by literally driving a car through a brick wall. The publicity campaign was a big success, way out of proportion to the size of the venture.

To source and supply the drivetrain, Pray relied on his skills as a salesman and Wayne McKinley’s connections at General Motors. Today, front-wheel drive is ubiquitous but developing a FWD drivetrain in the early 1960s was a challenge, particularly for a shoestring operation like Pray’s. He settled on using the drivetrain from the rear-engined Chevrolet Corvair, because its driveshafts were compatible with a FWD setup. McKinley arranged a meeting between Pray and the chief engineer of Chevy, and they struck a deal for engines and transmissions, including warranties and liabilities. In addition to GM’s cooperation, a number of automotive suppliers bent their rules so that Pray could buy comparatively tiny quantities of parts.

The newly incorporated Cord Automobile Co. built an assembly plant in Tulsa. While the ACD parts company was a partnership between Pray and McKinley, the new firm had investors. In late 1965, the revived Cord went on sale for $4450, a figure that turned out to be unrealistically low. As production started up, the investors wanted to fix things in place, but Pray still considered the new Cord and the new factory to be works in progress. Conflict with the board of directors grew, and after only two production cars were completed (six prototypes were made by the ACD Company), McKinley was given the task of telling his friend that he had to go. Pray agreed, providing McKinley turned over his 49 percent of ACD to Pray.

Production continued at a slow pace. The price of each car was raised to almost $6000 but the company was still bleeding cash. In 1966, the July 4th holiday weekend stretched into a plant shutdown after just 91 production series cars were assembled. McKinley tried to find an angel investor, but his efforts were in In March 1967 the assets were liquidated in a bankruptcy sale. Some of those assets ended up going into the regrettably styled, rear-wheel-drive SAMCO Cord, about which the less said, the better.

Pray went through a period of depression, and he and his wife separated. To break out of his depression, Pray got together with the Cord Automobile Company’s former chief engineer to make a full-size reproduction of the boat-tailed Auburn Speedster 866, one of the iconic automobiles of the 1930s. Starting with the frame and suspension from a Ford Galaxie, they made some modifications, stretching it to match the Speedster’s 127-inch wheelbase, shortening the overhangs, and making a removable crossmember to allow access to the oil pan. They disassembled Pray’s personal 1936 Speedster and used the body panels to make molds for fiberglass reproductions, which were mounted to a birdcage structure atop the frame. Ford initially sold him frames and drivetrains directly but an Oklahoma Ford dealer got wind of the deal and complained about Pray’s discounted prices and special treatment. Pray had to buy through the dealer, significantly increasing costs.

The first second-generation Auburn Speedster was delivered in April 1968 for the price of $8450, though that would go up $1000 by the end of the year. Eventually the price would rise to $28,650 by 1981. Again, publicity was substantial and Pray delivered finished Speedsters to celebrities like the Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling and King Hassan II of Morocco.

In 1971, Pray decided to start offering complete Auburn Speedster kits, minus drivetrains. While it was a successful venture, he rued the decision later as it made it possible for copycats to make molds off of the body panels. At one time there were two dozen companies making “Auburn Speedsters” copied from Pray’s parts. He ended up spending over $100,000 defending his trademarks on the brand and model names. One advantage that he had over the forgers, though, was the fact that he still owned the original “factory” and had access to all those NOS parts, so Pray’s Speedsters always had some authentic Auburn parts, like door handles and other trim. Another advantage was that Pray was a stickler for quality. The build quality of many of the copies was abysmal.

In 1981, when production ended, 138 Glenn Pray Auburn Speedsters had been built. An additional 18 dual-cowl phaeton versions, designed by Glenn’s son Doug and designated the Auburn Speedster 874, were also built at a starting price of $60,000 in 1974. To protect the design from copycat replicar builders, Glenn Pray filed for a design patent.

As with the Cord 8/10 Sportsmans, the Glenn Pray Auburns typically fetch mid-to-high five-figure prices when they come to auction.

In 1979, Glenn Pray had a heart attack, requiring bypass surgery, and he decided to retire for health reasons, though he finished three more cars after he retired. He also built one Duesenberg Model J replica. He was a treasured member of the Auburn, Cord, and Duesenberg communities until his passing in 2011.

The Auburn Cord Duesenberg Company still exists in Broken Arrow, now run by Glenn Pray’s grandson Adam. The company still sells OEM ACD parts, though the heart of the business is concours-level restorations of Auburns, Cords, and Duesenbergs. When I recently spoke with Glenn’s son Don Pray, he said that there were currently eight Cords getting restored and that approximately 350 vintage cars have passed through their shop. The firm also services Lycoming engines, another part of E.L. Cord’s industrial empire. The shop employs more than a dozen people and may have as many as three dozen classic Cords and Auburns undergoing restoration or service at any one time.

In 2018 the ACD Company introduced what it calls the Auburn Speedster G3, a third-generation car. Unlike the Ford-based, second-generation Auburn Speedster, the new car is based on the original 1930s Speedster, using OEM and reproduction parts. The G3 is not completely original, though. As Doug Pray told an Oklahoman newspaper, “The problem with a 1935 new car with 1935 parts is they drive like a 1935 car. What we are doing is upgrading the engine from 150 horsepower to 250 horsepower with a new supercharger, aluminum billet pistons and rods, along with improved brakes and steering.”

So far, one G3 has been completed and two more are under construction.

The asking price for the Auburn Speedster G3 is $750,000, exactly ten times what Glen Pray paid for all those parts all those years ago. I bet the old shop teacher who sold his own cars to finance that purchase would smile at the thought. If you’re driving a restomod, a replicar, or a continuation series vehicle, the thought of Glenn Pray should bring a smile to your face as well.