When E.L. Cord decided to get out of the car business in August 1937 and take up real estate in California, he sold his stake of the Cord Corporation – the holding company that controlled Auburn, Cord, Duesenberg and Checker automobiles, along with American Airways, Stinson Aircraft, and several other companies – to a group of investors , who sold the Auburn and Cord assets to Dallas Winslow, a businessman who had become rich and famous by buying up the assets of other, smaller defunct automobile companies including Flint, Briscoe, Stearns-Knight, Peerless, Franklin, Wills St. Clair, Haynes, and dozens more.
Winslow apparently had little interest in the Cord and Auburn names and trademarks. Instead, he spent the next 20 years marketing, selling, and in some cases reproducing parts for those cars.
In 1960 shop teacher Glenn Pray saw the potential in the defunct marques, and so put together the $75,000 deal and then moved 350 tons of parts and the operations of the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Company to Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.
Pray licensed the Cord name to other companies like Mattel and Hallmark, and sold off the Auburn name and trademark in 2005 for $500,000.
He died in 2011, and his family decided to sell the Cord trademarks in 2014 for $242,000 to Craig Corbell, who got to within a year of putting prototypes for his Cord revival project on the road, but tossed in the towel citing the lack of guidelines from the federal government regarding low-volume replica cars.
The livestream of the August 31st 2019 Auburn Auction By Worldwide Auctioneers showed the auctioneer kick off the bidding with an opening bid of $300,000 - with no interest at that price, it came down to $200K, and then $100K. When the opening bid changed to $50K, buyers started to get in on the action. But not for much
https://www.hemmings.com/blog/2014/09/19/rights-to-the-cord-name-and-trademark-come-up-for-sale/
https://www.hemmings.com/blog/2019/05/16/with-cord-revival-project-stalled-cord-rights-to-be-auctioned-off-again/
https://oldtimerdaily.com/the-famous-cord-trademark-is-for-sale-now/
https://news.yahoo.com/cord-sells-bargain-price-auction-222411849.html
https://worldwideauctioneers.com/results/
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