If you have gone looking for Worldwide Auctioneers lately, you will have found a placeholder page and not much else. The Auburn, Indiana auction house is still there, still at the same address, still running the same auctions — it is trading under a different name. Worldwide Auctioneers now operates as Kruse Auctions.
Almost nobody has written this down clearly, which is why people keep searching for it. This page is the plain explanation: what changed, what did not, what the company runs now, and why the Kruse name on the building carries more history than either brand.
Effectively, yes. Kruse Auctions operates from the same Auburn, Indiana headquarters at 5634 Opportunity Blvd that Worldwide Auctioneers used, and John Kruse — a principal at Worldwide — is Kruse Auctions’ founder and sole owner. The Auburn Auction carried straight across: Worldwide ran the 55th edition, and the 56th Annual Auburn Auction & Show runs under Kruse Auctions over Labor Day weekend, 2–5 September 2026. The worldwideauctioneers.com site has been reduced to a placeholder.
The rebrand was reported locally by WANE 15 in Fort Wayne, ahead of the Auburn Spring Auction. Beyond the reporting, the observable facts line up on their own:
What has not changed is the format. Kruse Auctions still runs boutique, curated sales rather than volume events — a few hundred carefully selected cars rather than a thousand, with memorabilia alongside. If you liked how Worldwide ran a sale, that is the same operation under a name with deeper local roots.
Worldwide Auctioneers built its reputation on curation. Quality over quantity, every car vetted for authenticity, provenance and condition, and a buyer list that reached well beyond the Midwest. That reputation is the asset that carried into Kruse Auctions.
There is one thing widely repeated about Worldwide that was never true, including in an earlier version of this article: that it only ever held auctions at its own Indiana headquarters. It did not. Worldwide ran a Scottsdale Auction and an annual Pacific Grove Auction on the Monterey Peninsula during Monterey Car Week — its own archived pages for both are still online. Auburn was the home base, not the only stage.
We are correcting that here because we published it. The distinction matters if you are researching past results: Worldwide sale records exist under several event names and in more than one state, and a search limited to Auburn will miss a lot of them.
Kruse Auctions is a boutique collector car auction house headquartered in Auburn, Indiana, run by John Kruse as auctioneer and chief certified appraiser. Its tagline — built on heritage, driven by integrity, guided by vision — is doing more work than most taglines, because the heritage part is literal and we will get to it.
The company runs a small, deliberate calendar rather than a national touring circuit: two headline Auburn sales a year, a Sealed Bid Series, and dedicated memorabilia auctions. Cars are catalogued and curated rather than run through in volume, and the memorabilia side is a real business rather than an afterthought — 150 lots at a typical sale.
Two headline sales anchor the year, both in Auburn, both at Kruse Plaza.
| Sale | When | Format |
|---|---|---|
| 56th Annual Auburn Auction & Show | 2–5 September 2026 (preview Wed 2nd; auction Thu 3rd – Sat 5th) | 3-day boutique auction, 300+ collector cars and 150 memorabilia lots |
| Auburn Spring Auction | Late April (2026: 22–25 April) | 2-day boutique auction, around 250 cars and 150 memorabilia lots |
| Sealed Bid Series | Periodic | Private, non-public bidding on individual consignments |
| Memorabilia auctions | Alongside the headline sales | Signs, petroliana, automobilia and collection material |
The Labor Day sale is the one to plan around. It runs alongside Auburn Car Week, when thousands of collector cars fill the town for the wider festival, so the Kruse Auctions catalogue is only part of what is worth the trip.
Auburn was an automotive town before it was an auction town. The Auburn Automobile Company built Auburns, Cords and Duesenbergs here, and for a stretch of the 1920s and 30s this small Indiana city was producing some of the most extravagant cars in the world. The company did not survive the Depression; it folded in 1937. What survived was the town’s sense of itself, kept alive by an annual Labor Day festival built around the cars it once made.
The auction part starts with Russell Kruse, who finished a course at the Reppert School of Auctioneering in 1952 and began an auction business in Auburn with his father-in-law. In 1971 the Auburn Chamber of Commerce asked him to help raise money for the festival. His suggestion was a consignment auction of collector cars — an idea nobody had really tried at scale.
Roughly 80 cars were entered. About 17,000 people turned up. A Duesenberg drew a rejected bid of $61,000, which in 1971 was extraordinary money for a used car and got the event national attention. That afternoon is, by common consent, where the American collector car auction industry begins — which is why Auburn is routinely described as its birthplace, and why the 2026 sale is numbered the 56th.
John Kruse is Russell’s grandson; his father is Dennis Kruse, long a fixture in auction industry education. He took part in his 30th Auburn Auction in 2025. So when Worldwide Auctioneers became Kruse Auctions, the name going up was not a marketing invention — it is the family name that started the whole category in that town, on that weekend, fifty-odd years ago.
A boutique auction works differently from a volume one, and the differences are worth knowing before you register.
If you are weighing an auction against a private sale, the honest answer is that it depends on the car. Auction suits cars with a story that benefits from a room full of competing bidders. Private sale suits cars where the buyer pool is small and known. Our look at which exotic car values are actually appreciating and our Monterey auction results archive both cover how those two channels have been pricing differently.
The sale is the reason to book, but it is not the reason to stay an extra day. Labor Day weekend in Auburn is a full automotive festival, and the auction sits inside it rather than beside it.
The Auburn Cord Duesenberg Festival has run since 1956 and reaches its 70th anniversary in 2026. It is volunteer-run and not-for-profit, and it funnels its proceeds into the town’s automotive museums. Most of the activity lands on the Friday and Saturday, with pre-festival events building through the preceding week — which overlaps neatly with the auction preview days.
The Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum is the other reason to come. It opened in 1974 in the former Auburn Automobile Company administration building — a 1930 Art Deco design by Alvin M. Strauss — and holds more than 120 cars. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 2005, and it is one of the best-preserved surviving examples of an independent American automaker’s own facilities. Standing in the original showroom is a different experience from reading about the marque.
The town also hosts NATMUS, the Early Ford V-8 Foundation Museum and, improbably, the International Monster Truck Hall of Fame. For a place of Auburn’s size, the concentration of automotive history is hard to match anywhere in the United States.
A rebrand creates a practical problem for anyone valuing a car: the sale history splits across two names. If you are researching what a comparable car made, search both.
We are working with Kruse Auctions, and their consignments will be appearing in the Exotic Motors marketplace. That is a straightforward fit: they curate rather than churn, they operate from the town where this whole business started, and the cars that come through Auburn — pre-war American classics, muscle, European sports cars, modern exotics — are exactly what our buyers are looking for.
Our own family has been in the car business for more than a century, so we have a soft spot for an operation whose credentials go back three generations in the same town. We will update this page as the Kruse Auctions inventory goes live on our site.
If you were searching for Worldwide Auctioneers, you now know where it went. If you are planning a trip, Labor Day weekend in Auburn is the one to book. And if you are buying or selling rather than spectating, we can help either way.
Browse the Exotic Motors inventory or list your car with us. New to this end of the market? Start with our first-time exotic car buyer’s guide. And our sister publication Exotic Car News follows the auction calendar year-round.
It now trades as Kruse Auctions. The company operates from the same Auburn, Indiana headquarters at 5634 Opportunity Blvd, John Kruse — a principal at Worldwide — is founder and sole owner, and the Auburn Auction continued its numbering straight across, with Worldwide running the 55th annual edition and Kruse Auctions the 56th. The worldwideauctioneers.com website is now a placeholder page.
No, though the families overlap. Kruse International was the earlier Auburn auction company built by the Kruse family, later sold to ITT, then to eBay in 1999, then bought back in 2003. Kruse Auctions is John Kruse’s current company and is the rebranded Worldwide Auctioneers. Both trace back to the same Auburn auction tradition.
The 56th Annual Auburn Auction and Show runs 2-5 September 2026 over Labor Day weekend, with Wednesday 2 September as a preview day and bidding Thursday through Saturday. The Auburn Spring Auction runs in late April. Both take place at Kruse Plaza in Auburn, Indiana.
At Kruse Plaza, 5634 Opportunity Blvd Ste A, Auburn, Indiana 46706 — a 200,000-square-foot climate-controlled facility. Unlike its predecessor, which also ran a Scottsdale sale and an annual Pacific Grove sale on the Monterey Peninsula, the current Kruse Auctions calendar is centred on Auburn.
Auburn built Auburns, Cords and Duesenbergs until the Auburn Automobile Company folded in 1937. In 1971 the town’s Chamber of Commerce asked auctioneer Russell Kruse to help fundraise for its Labor Day festival; he proposed a collector car consignment auction. Around 80 cars were entered, roughly 17,000 people attended, and a Duesenberg drew a rejected bid of $61,000. That event is widely regarded as the start of the American collector car auction industry.
The Labor Day Auburn Auction catalogues 300 or more collector cars plus about 150 memorabilia lots across three auction days. The Auburn Spring Auction is smaller at around 250 cars and 150 memorabilia lots over two days. These are deliberately boutique catalogues rather than volume sales.
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