Epic rural Iowa car auction tells the story of a farmer who lived life at 100 miles per hour (2024)

YARMOUTH, Ia. — Bob Gabeline couldn’t slow down even in the last several miles to his own gravesite. He hot-rodded his way to the tiny rural cemetery where he was planted among the cornfields that had yielded his fortune.

The patriarch of a family farm, trucking and grain elevator empire in southeast Iowa—and the man behind a massiveauction Monday throughFridaydrawing worldwide interest — was 86 when he died in September.

Since Gabeline was a manic car and tractor collector who loved to customize everything on wheels, of course there was no drab standard hearse to haul him in his funeral procession.

No, this car nut's black-and-chrome coffin was loaded into the back of a 1937 Ford funeral car painted bright red.

His youngest of four children, Dan, climbed behind the wheel with his wife, Amy, riding shotgun.

Older brother Mike followed in his father’s souped-up pickup, with a tow rope in back in case the vintage Ford broke down. A couple dozen other family members chose classic cars of all contours and colors to drive from among more than 300 that Gabeline had amassed throughout his lifetime.

To salute their dad, the two brothers floored it for a final memorial drag race with the coffin rattling in back, whizzing by more than a dozen semis that led the funeral procession.

“He got to the cemetery first,” Mike said.

Yes, even the car that sped Gabeline to his grave will be on the sale block inone of the largest auctions of its kind in Iowa in decades.

Nine months after his death, Gabeline’s unincorporated hometown of Yarmouth, population 78,has become the center of the universe for car, tractor, auto parts and antique collectors. The Sullivan auction company from Hamilton, Ill., and the Gabelines are preparing for a throng of as many as 10,000.

Enthusiasts will flock from Sweden, Germany, Britain andAustralia. It’s rumored that Jay Leno or his surrogates will scope out the sale Sunday, before bidding begins in earnest Monday. (Grounds are open to the public this weekend for perusal. Early online bidding already has begun and will set the starting price for many items.)

Gabeline, if he was here to chomp one of his ubiquitouscigars and survey the scene, would feel fully at home among his people.

Todd Mercer, a classic car consultant from Joliet, Ill., has researched the Gabeline collection since December for the Sullivans. His career is a testament to the factthat large car sales aren't unprecedented. An old Chevy dealer four years ago unloadedmore than 500 cars outside the small town of Pierce, Neb.

But with Gabeline, it's not only the sheer volume but the variety, with “the number of cars of all different makes" spanning nearly a century, Mercer said. And then there are the vast rows of tractors, firetrucks, toy pedal cars, antiques and more.

There's a 1956 Ford made to look like a Mercury, the car whose likeness is etched on the back of Gabeline’s tombstone.

A 1969 Dodge Dart "Swinger" car was painted by George Barris (famed painter of the Batmobile and other pop culture icons)and could draw anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000, according to Mercer.

There's a rare 1915 Saxon. A 1929 Stutz Blackhawk.

The epicenter of the sale will be inside a massive 120,000-square-foot machine shed. The barnyard outside is lined with rustier cars, old co*ke machines andbicycles.

Inside another nearby shed, 32 hayracks are laden with everything from auto parts to issues of “Thunderbird Illustrated.”

Signs posted around the perimeter of the farm proclaim in bold red type: “Absolutely no lookers.”

In recent days, the farm has swarmed with family members in John Deere Gators, shiny black pickups and flatbed trailers.It all felt alittle like a fairgrounds, complete with a fleet of tractor shuttles to haul people from distant parking lots.

The collection will be auctioned off in daily descending order of prestige, from the most coveted cars Monday to a final “cleanup day” of miscellaneous items Friday.

“Everything he did, he was a driver,” Dan said of his late father. “And he pushed on everything. And he plunged into everything. He didn’t go into it small.”

The blur of an ornery speed demon

The most common word used to describe Gabeline is “ornery.” He was a speed demon who flew along Iowa's back roads as if he was on a racetrack. His blur was interrupted often enough by speeding tickets that occasionally he lost his driver’s license. (According to his sons, he then procured licenses in other states, such as Texas.)

His beloved wife, Donna, who died six years before him, reportedly had a less extreme lead foot.

In his early 80s, Gabeline still screamed down the highway at more than 100 miles per hour. In court records, I found a traffic ticket as recent as 2010.

“I rode with him one time,” Amy said of a trip in her father-in-law’s Ford Lightning pickup. “Within 30 seconds we were going so fast. … From then on, I drove.”

According to family lore, Gabelinesurvived10 or so wrecks. One involved a collision with cattle at 100 miles per hour in which supposedly he propelled a calf out of a pregnant cow's womb.

At this point I don't think I need to explicitly state that Gabeline was impulsive. When in 1975 he decided to build a new home to replace the dilapidated farmhouse where he was born, he didn’t clear space before spring planting. He wandered out into the middle of a mature cornfield as the stalks were about ready to sprout tassels and staked out a plot for his sons to hack away at with corn knives.

The 35-feet-long Stars and Stripes thatnow flaps in the breeze 80 feet in the air along the highway near the entrance to the farm isn’t a landmark for the auction; it’s a memorial to Gabeline that was raised last fall on the site of his originalfarmhouse.

'He put his own spin on everything'

To gaze at Gabeline’s accumulated stuff now strewn across some 80 acres is to see the man’s high-octane personality spread out as if a jagged biography ofmetal, wheels and rust.

He was on the phone constantly, buying cars from around the nation.A 2-foot-tall stack of car magazines piled up each month in his home.

His vacations were to swap meets and car shows, not the beach.

He was forever daydreaming about his next custom auto mashup and doodling sketches on paper.

“Hardly anything has been left alone,” Dan said of his father's collection. “He couldn’t stand it. He’s put his own spin on everything.”

There’s the 8N Ford tractor that he souped up with a V-8 engine and semi exhaust pipes so that it screams down the road at 70 miles per hour.

“Sounds like a jet engine,” said daughter-in-law Diane Gabeline.

Gabeline installed a Cadillac motor in avintage Packard possibly owned by native Iowan Herbert Hoover afterhis presidency. (The original motor sits next to the car on a pallet.)

Gabeline's kids inherited the business.Most of the family not only farmsand works together but lives within a 7-mile radius.

Mike joked that he and his siblings in the third generation have been relegated to driving trucks, while their children now operate the high-tech combines.

“They don’t think we’re smart enough to run them,” he said. “They got all the computers in them.”

But one thing they did not inherit was the car-collecting gene.

“None of us had the passion that Dad had, for the cars, the tractors, anything like that,” Dan said.

And so the kids felt that the best choice was to sell their dad's overwhelming collection.

Those who will swoop in fromaround the globemay find themselves bidding against Gabeline family members. In the interest of fairness, the siblings (Dan, Mike, third brother Dave and their spouses)elected to put everything into the auction and individually buy back what they wanted.

The Gabelines already have weathered family strife. The oldest sibling, Teri Wilkerson, now runs her own trucking company in nearby Morning Sun with her husband, Jeff. Court records show a lawsuit filed in 2003 against the family grain company that eventually was settled. She then was cut out of her father's will.

The brothers prefer not to talk about what Dan called "a bad deal."

Wilkerson cherishes conversations on faith with her father near the end of his life.

She also has fond memories of the red 1963 Chevy that her dad gave her in the early 1970s to drive to school.

“I usually beat everybody when we would drag race north of town,” she said.

I get the feeling that the whine of an engine qualifies as a lullaby for this entire family.

'He was just a good old farm boy'

All this began in 1948 with a single tractor. Gabeline was the son of a Cadillac car salesman. He graduated in 1948 from Yarmouth High and strung together 300 acres at a time when that was a vast farm.

He was drafted into the Army for the Korean War and afterward began to rebuild his operation.At the height of his agricultural footprint he commanded not only 12,000 acres in Iowa but another 10,000 or so in Texas.

Yet friend and neighbor Bob Byczek of rural Mount Union characterized Gabeline as "common as an old pair of bluejeans."

“He never put on any airs or anything like that," Byczek said. "He was just a good old farm boy.”

The racer who survived multiple wrecks in the end was felled by a slow, common collision: a fall at home in which he split his head open and spent his final months in a care facility.

The funeral day was full of Gabeline's trademark ornery presence, according to his family, whether it was the flocks of hundreds of blackbirds that circled, or a snake that slithered near the pallbearers and forced them to dance their way along while lugging his coffin.

And then there was the coffin lid. The funeral director was a good friend of Gabeline's who leaned in to whisper a last goodbye. But the lid fell and sandwiched her atop Gabeline. People in the front row had to leap up and extract her.

That was a fitting parting joke for a man who said hewanted to be propped behind the wheel of one of his cars and parked in front of the farm office so he could keep watch over his family; sort of a permanent “Weekend at Bernie’s."

In one sense, only now is Gabeline perfectly, permanently still and unlikely to break any more traffic laws.

But I prefer to think that he’s zooming farther and faster than ever as his lifetime of wheels and debris now speeds away in every direction from tiny Yarmouth where he was king.

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 orkmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns and video atDesMoinesRegister.com/KyleMunson. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (@KyleMunson).

Auction: When and where

The Bob Gabeline auction with more than 300 cars and more than 200 tractors begins with an open house and registration from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday (June 24 and 25). Then the auction begins at 8 a.m. daily, Monday through Friday.

The Gabeline farm is at 25900 205th Ave., Yarmouth. Go to sullivanauctioneers.com for more information.