TRADING UP; AUCTION OWNER FINDS A NICHE- FOR HIS CLASSICS AND HIMSELF.

Byline: PHIL BERG

"I don't have faith in the stock market,'' says Phil Kuhn, owner of a public-auction company in Chicago. "You can't control it. I want to build barns and garages and have a portfolio of cars that I can control and enjoy. It's my niche.''

Kuhn's father encouraged him and his six siblings to tinker with cars as kids. When he grew up, Kuhn got a job at a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Chicago. He noticed that traders from the nearby Chicago Board of Trade made up an unusually high percentage of cash buyers at the dealership, and in the mid-1980s, he decided that becoming a commodities trader would be the best route to support his addiction to cars. After 10 years as a trader, he got bored.

"I had nine cars at my house in the suburbs, and I took a train to work every day. I thought, `There's something wrong with this picture,' '' he recalls.

So he developed a plan to work with cars dailyhis favorites are postwar sports cars and prewar American classics such as Packards, Auburns and Cordswith the ultimate goal of getting a special, one-of-a-kind Duesenberg.

"I told myself that by the time I'm 50, I want a Duesen-berg,'' he says. "So I started to do my homework on them.'' He set about looking for a high-quality restored example and eventually bought the famed 1932 Murphy-bodied, dualcowl Phaeton Duesenberg J convertiblewhich won at Pebble Beach in 2004from former Lionel Trains chairman Richard Kughn in Detroit.

To escape the Board of Trade, Kuhn started an auction com-pany to sell everyday cars to the public, after the Salvation Army in 1998 had asked him if he could sell the donated cars that were stockpiling at the charity's ...