Photo by Felix via Unsplash
The biggest trophy in this business went out on Wednesday night to a friendship that began with a Cadillac that never sold.
The Automotive Hall of Fame inducted its Class of 2026 on September 23 at The Department at Hudson’s in downtown Detroit, and among the four honors handed out, one went to a pair of Arizona car guys whose surnames have been welded together with a hyphen since 1971. Tom Barrett and Russ Jackson were recognized for building the collector car auction industry more or less from scratch. Neither was in the room. Jackson died on January 30, 1993. Barrett died on April 20, 2004. They shared the evening with Akio Toyoda, race car constructor Giampaolo Dallara, and the four founders of TomTom, which is an odd lineup on paper until you notice the common thread: every one of them created a category that didn’t exist before they showed up.
A Want Ad, a Joan Crawford Cadillac, and No Sale
In 1963, Barrett ran a newspaper ad for a 1933 Cadillac Town Car originally built for Joan Crawford. Jackson, a man with a well-documented weakness for Cadillacs carrying 12 and 16 cylinders, answered it. He never bought the car. He got a business partner instead, which is a better return than most classified ads deliver.
What made the partnership work was that the two men were terrible overlaps and perfect complements. Barrett was the closer who could tell you what a car was worth in a decade when nobody could look it up. Jackson was the guy who could tell you whether the car actually worked.
Russ Jackson: GM Institute, a Fire Department, and a Chicken Coop in Victorville
Jackson was born in Pontiac, Michigan, on November 19, 1915, which is roughly the automotive equivalent of being born in a recording studio. He attended the General Motors Institute in Flint, the company’s co-op school that alternated classroom engineering with time on the shop floor. That detail matters more than it sounds. GMI graduates weren’t trained to admire cars; they were trained to take them apart, measure what they found, and put a number on it. Jackson carried that habit into every garage he ever walked through.
From there he sold cars at local dealerships and served with the Pontiac Fire Department. He married Nellie in 1940 and joined the Air Force a year later, starting on the ground crew and working up to chief mechanic across postings in Gulfport and Biloxi, Mississippi, and in California. He arranged for Nellie to work as an accountant wherever he was stationed so the two of them never had to be apart, and family lore holds that the accommodations at Victorville amounted to a chicken coop. Being a wartime chief mechanic is not a ceremonial title. It means triaging a fleet, scrounging parts that don’t exist, and making a decision about what gets fixed today. That is, almost line for line, the job description for running an auction’s inventory thirty years later.
After the war he ran Russ’s Country Store outside Pontiac from 1946 to 1960. The family moved to Arizona that same year, chasing dry heat for Nellie’s arthritis, and once they landed in Scottsdale the Jacksons opened a full-service Super Car Wash that held the contract on the city’s police cruisers and did prep work for local dealerships. They also opened the Classic Carriage House, where they bought, sold, rebuilt, and refinished classics.
Read that resume again and the auction business is already hiding inside it. Dealer prep teaches you that presentation is money. A restoration shop teaches you what a bad repair looks like from ten feet away. A police fleet contract teaches you scheduling and volume. Jackson spent a decade accidentally building the operational spine of a collector car auction.
Tom Barrett: The Judge’s Son Who Went the Other Way
Barrett was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on June 1, 1928. His father was a federal judge in Chicago who wanted his son in law school and considered the whole car fixation unserious. Barrett was a collector by 19 and moved to Arizona in 1960 to broker real estate, then did something genuinely clever: he used the car hobby as a client pipeline, building relationships with collectors around the country who also happened to buy and sell property. For nearly three decades his Paradise Valley estate, La Paz, functioned as an unofficial international clearinghouse, with thousands of significant cars passing through the gates.
He became known worldwide as an authority on what great cars were worth, and earned the nickname the Grandfather of the Collector Car Industry. It is easy to undersell that in an era of online price databases and results archives. Before any of that existed, valuation lived in the heads of maybe two dozen people on the planet. The person who knew the market didn’t just report the market, he set it. Barrett’s word moved money.
He also went hunting where almost nobody else would. Barrett traveled behind the Iron Curtain to chase down cars that had been in Germany during the war, bringing home big-displacement Mercedes, Bugattis, one-off coachbuilt specials, and early Grand Prix racers. Anyone who has tried to import a single vehicle from overseas knows the paperwork is a fight; doing it out of Cold War Eastern Europe, without a customs broker on speed dial, was closer to an expedition. Many of those cars are now the anchor pieces in the world’s most famous private collections, which means a meaningful share of what gets photographed at concours events today exists because one guy from Oak Park refused to take no for an answer.
His preservation streak went beyond buying. Barrett backed the Classic Car Club of America for decades, and in 1989 the CCCA named the restored two-story antique barn at the Gilmore Car Museum in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the Thomas W. Barrett III Barn in his honor. He dabbled in racing too, fielding his own Indy car team in 1981 and sponsoring at the Indianapolis 500 for several years.
The Part Everyone Forgets: It Started as a Charity Car Show
Before there was an auction, there was a parade. In 1967, the Barrett and Jackson families teamed up with the Classic Car Club of Arizona to launch Fiesta de los Autos Elegantes, a car show and street parade in Scottsdale that raised money for the city’s art center and community library. That is the actual seed of the company. Not a business plan, not a pitch deck, just two families putting on a show to fund a library.
The Automotive Hall of Fame, for what it’s worth, began inducting members that same year, and has since honored more than 300 people worldwide. It took 59 years for the institution to circle back to the two men who were, in 1967, still directing traffic at a charity parade.
By the fall of 1971, the show was retired and the pair went all in on a collector car auction, held that winter next to the Safari Resort on Scottsdale Road. They seeded it with 75 cars pulled from their own collections, headlined by Barrett’s pair of Mercedes-Benz 770 Phaetons, and the national weekend evening news covered it live.
Here is the detail worth chewing on. Those 75 cars were theirs. Modern auction houses take consignments precisely so the inventory risk sits with the seller; if a car stalls, the seller eats it. Barrett and Jackson had no such cushion. A soft night in the desert in 1971 would have cost them their own cars at their own prices, in front of a television camera. Founders who put their personal garages on the block tend to build companies that understand sellers, and you can still see that in the house’s later insistence on no-reserve consignments.
Nellie Jackson Belongs in This Story
Any honest accounting of the founding includes Nellie Jackson, co-founder, longtime executive director, and the woman the hobby came to call the First Lady of Collector Cars. Born in Pontiac on August 7, 1919, she started out in cost accounting at Fisher Body, a General Motors division, which is why the company had real books from the beginning instead of a shoebox of receipts.
Her own car story began when she and Russ hauled a 1934 V12 Cadillac Opera Coupe out of a junkyard they drove past on vacation. She served as treasurer of the Classic Car Club of America and was elected its first female regional director. Through the mid-1960s her daily driver was a 1937 Cadillac V16 limousine, which remains one of the great commuter-car flexes in American history. In June 2004 she received the Meguiar’s Treasure of the Collector Car Hobby award. She died on February 10, 2010.
Colleagues remembered her ability to recite the ownership history of significant cars from memory, whether they had sold at Barrett-Jackson, elsewhere, or privately. That was a provenance database running on one person’s recall, decades before anyone typed a VIN into a search bar. The owner takeaway hasn’t changed: paperwork is value. Build the binder, keep the receipts, photograph the restoration, and document the chain of custody. Two identical cars with different files are not identical cars, and the gap shows up in the hammer price.
What They Built, in Numbers
The million-dollar barrier fell in 1988, when STP chief Andy Granatelli paid $1.075 million for a 1932 Duesenberg Model J, the first seven-figure sale in company history. The auction moved to WestWorld of Scottsdale in 1989, where it still lives, and a 1939 Mercedes-Benz 540K Roadster brought $1.7 million. The 1990 sale produced a 1932 Hispano-Suiza J12 and a 1938 Bugatti Type 57S Atlante over $2 million each, a pair of Ferrari Daytonas at $2.2 million, roughly 60,000 spectators, and $37.3 million in total sales, a company record that held until 2004.
Fast-forward: the 2024 Scottsdale sale ran the largest docket the company had ever assembled, 2,016 vehicles, every one at no reserve, for $200.9 million, plus $6.7 million in automobilia for a $207.6 million total and a 100 percent sell-through rate. This past January, Scottsdale also produced a $1.1 million 1963 Corvette Z06. In 2026 the company staged its first Midwest auction, in Columbus, Ohio, where a 2015 Porsche 918 Spyder brought $2.695 million and an original 1969 Boss 429 set a world record at $1.045 million.
A buyer’s note on that 100 percent figure, because it gets misread constantly: total sell-through is an arithmetic consequence of a no-reserve format, not a verdict on demand. When nothing can fail to sell, nothing does. The real signal is the spread between the strong lots and the ordinary ones, which is exactly what made this year’s big Alabama no-reserve dispersal such an education, and what the 2026 Monterey results made plain at a national scale. If you’re bidding, watch the middle of the docket, not the headliners.
The Charity Habit Never Went Away
The library-fundraiser instinct from 1967 turned into the company’s most durable tradition. Barrett-Jackson crossed $100 million raised for charity in 2018, the same year former President George W. Bush appeared on the block to help sell a 2018 Carbon 65 Edition Corvette donated by General Motors for $1.4 million, and passed $150 million in 2023. The house waives its fees and commissions on charity lots so the entire hammer price goes to the cause, which is why celebrity and one-off consignments keep landing there, including the final A90 Toyota Supra.
If you ever consider donating a car this way, know that it is a different animal from a private sale on the tax side. A public auction result establishes documented fair market value in a way a handshake never will, and the substantiation rules for donated vehicles are their own small maze. Talk to an accountant before you sign the consignment agreement, not after.
Why the Hall Got This One Right
The Class of 2026 was first revealed on February 7 at a private reception in Naples, Florida, and announced publicly two days later. Hall president Sarah Cook described induction as “the highest honor bestowed in the global automotive industry,” and in Barrett and Jackson’s case the honor is less about a company than about a behavior. They took the private, gated, whisper-network world of significant automobiles and put it on a stage with a public number attached. Every price guide, every results database, every enthusiast who can now find out what their car is worth without knowing a guy, traces back to that decision.
Not bad for two men who met over a Cadillac neither of them ended up owning.
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