Just 196 Supercharged Cord 812 roadsters were built by the Auburn Automobile Company. They are rare, radical, futuristic and stunningly beautiful. In over 75 years that beauty has not faded. Known as "the coffin-nose Cord" the rarest of them all is the Tom Mix Cord, a 1937 supercharged 812 convertible. It's the car in which cowboy star Tom Mix was killed.
Mix was one of America's first cowboy movie stars; the original Hollywood good guy in the white hat. The Pennsylvania-born cowboy star practically created the western movie genre single handed, and was a pall bearer at Wyatt Earp's funeral. The cowboys Mix portrayed codified masculine behavior on the American frontier. He was the idol of millions of American boys.
Now owned by Bob White of Scottsdale, Arizona, Mix's Cord is one of only three with a rare set of options, including an external-mounted spare. White is a long time Cord enthusiast who bought Mix's car at auction in 2010. He then began a thorough and painstaking 18-month "frame-off" restoration, the car's first since 1940. The restoration revealed damage from the fatal accident. The Tom Mix Cord now appears, " . . . exactly as it did 15 minutes before the crash," said White. "Our biggest challenge has been determining what it looked like in 1940 and then reproducing those parts because everything had to be handmade."
See it at the 2012 Santa Fe Concorso, September 28th - 30th.
