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…