LEO GEPHART
He certainly wasn’t the first person to recognize the collectibility of old cars, but Leo Gephart did help lay many of the stones in the foundation of the collector car hobby as it exists today, leading many to mourn his death last week at the age of 85.
Born in 1929 on a farm near Sidney, Ohio, Gephart started working on old cars – including his first, a 1932 Ford roadster – as a teenager during World War II, and through his family’s acquaintance with Charles Kettering, soon became involved with the Antique Automobile Club of America. After a stint in the Air Force in his early 20s, Gephart returned to Ohio in the early 1950s, got a car dealer license, and began to sell new Studebakers.
At the same time, though, he also started buying and selling those older cars increasingly being recognized as classics (or Classics, depending on the definition) and took a keen interest in Duesenbergs. He sourced old cars from estate sales, used car auctions, and through word of mouth, but during the 1960s developed another method of buying and selling collector cars.
“He realized that if collectors would travel from state to state looking for old cars at estate sales, a lot of collectors could be expected to show up if a huge number of cars was gathered for sale in one place,” Jim Donnelly wrote in his profile of Gephart for the May 2008 issue of Hemmings Classic Car.
So Gephart, prodded on by the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Club, approached Russell Kruse with the idea of transforming the Kruse family’s longtime construction equipment auction business into a collector car auction business. Kruse held the first such auction in 1971 behind a Dairy Queen in Auburn, Indiana. Kruse subsequently grew the business into one of the world’s largest, helping establish Labor Day in Auburn as one of the anchors on the collector car calendar. RM Auctions – now RM Sotheby’s – bought the business and the auction park from Dean Kruse in 2010 and today operates it under the Auctions America banner.
That same year, Gephart approached a pair of car show organizers in Scottsdale, Arizona – Tom Barrett and Russ Jackson, the former Gephart had known from a Cadillac V-16 transaction – and convinced them to also put together a large-scale collector car auction in Scottsdale. Though Scottsdale isn’t a town rich in automotive history like Auburn, it does at least offer a preferable winter climate, one that attracted and continues to attract the same sorts of people likely to buy and sell collector cars. Barrett-Jackson has remained in Scottsdale and grown over the years to bring in bidders from all over the world, to inspire other auction houses to conduct their own sales during the same week in January, and to attract live television coverage.
“I grew up with Leo,” Craig Jackson said in a statement on Barrett-Jackson’s website. “He was an innovator and a visionary whose legacy will remain for years to come. He will be missed.”
Along the way, Gephart essentially founded two ancillary industries. He started Frosty’s Delivery Services, a car transport company that specialized in collector cars, which he later sold to Robert Pass (who renamed it Passport Transport), and which has since become a subsidiary of FedEx. And he became one of the first people involved in collector cars to offer appraisals on older cars to determine their market value.
“He was one of the three kings of the collector car trade,” said concept car collector Joe Bortz, who had known Gephart for decades. “Along with Tiny Gould and Bob Adams in Wisconsin, they were the guys who made the hobby what it is today.”
Gephart himself relocated his business to Scottsdale around 1981 and in later years he operated his own auctions and even partnered with other collector car dealers in the area to start an auto museum, though none of those ventures ultimately panned out. In about 2012, citing failing health, he scaled back his collector car business. The phones at the business have since been disconnected.
photo credit: © 2015 Richard Lentinello / Hemmings
text credit: © 2015 Daniel Strohl / Hemmings
