Airport Limousine

‘Safe, sanitary, scratchproof and durable’ – qualities that the Auburn Rubber Company reckoned would make their toys best sellers.

The business originated in 1913 as the Double Fabric Tire Company, making tyres for the locally produced Auburn cars in the town of Auburn, Illinois. It began to diversify into other rubber products in the 1920s, and the introduction of some toy soldiers in 1935 proved so popular that the company quickly brought other types of playthings to market.

Meanwhile, the Auburn car company had been taken over by Cord, so it’s not surprising that Auburn Rubber’s first toy vehicle was a coffin-nosed Cord, now a sought-after collector’s item. Many more cars, trucks, fire engines, racing cars and tractors were to follow.

After World War Two, Auburn’s moulded toy vehicles continued in production but the raw material used was now vinyl plastic rather than rubber. The Airport Limousine is typical of that era. Loosely based on a Plymouth, it’s a simple one-piece moulding with solid windows, whose flexibility would make it practically indestructible. The yellow wheels have no pretensions to realism but the designers managed to incorporate a surprising amount of detail, particularly in the figures moulded in relief on the side windows, which have hairstyles and headgear characteristic of the era.

As happens to most toy lines in the end, Auburn’s cars fell out of fashion and the company folded in 1969, having moved its operations to New Mexico a decade earlier.

Although the rubber used on the earlier vehicles tends to harden and cause the paint to flake off, plenty of the later vinyl examples have survived in good condition and usually need no more than a wash in warm soapy water to make them presentable.