Collector's auction features 700 classic, unusual vehicles

NOWALK, Ohio (AP) — With his best years behind him, Ron Hackenberger has decided to let go of his dream for a museum to house his collection of rare and unusual old cars and trucks.

Granted, a museum would have been an ambitious project for the retired businessman, cattle rancher, and entrepreneur.

Over the last 40 years, Hackenberger has amassed more than 700 cars and trucks as well as motorcycles, scooters, and numerous other wheeled and non-wheeled oddities.

In two weeks, it will all be gone, except for some keepsake vehicles he intends to divide among his family of six daughters and 20 grandchildren.

The collection of vehicles is believed to be one of the largest held in private hands. They will hit the auction block on the weekend of July 15-16 and will be sold with no reserve at a two-day sale open to anyone.

"I'm over 80 years old. It's time to move on and let somebody else enjoy them. I have owned them long enough," he said.

The cache of classic and obscure cars and trucks has been stored away for decades in a discount department store in Norwalk, at an old lumberyard near the Ohio Turnpike, and two other sites.

A bulk of the collection are the so-called "orphans" of post-World War II auto manufacturing – Nash, Crosley, Studebaker, Kaiser, Packard, Rambler, DeSoto, and Hudson. The independents – the makes mopped up by the Big Three in the 1950s and '60s – were Hackenberger's specialty.

He particularly had a penchant for anything made by Studebakers, the South Bend, Indiana,-based auto manufacturer that closed its doors in 1966.