Quote:
Originally Posted by Tommy
Around 1968 I worked Summer and Winter quarters at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama as an engineering co-op student. The daily commute to the base was crowded and slow as thousands of employees went to work at the same time. One winter I found myself creeping toward work along side a Shelby Cobra about every week or so. It was apparently someone's daily driver. I always heard it before I saw it. ...
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I grew up in Huntsville. In the late 1960s there were at least eleven (11) Cobras, one 427 Cobra, and a GT40 MKI in Huntsville. There was a red with white GT40 MKII owned by a man on Mud Tavern Road just south of Decatur. It was kept in a very small wooden shed maybe 60 feet from the road. I got to talk to the former owner about the car about twelve years ago to see what he still recalled. I saw the car in person at a SAAC Convention years later. I long since forgot its chassis number. Yes, he occasionally drove the GT on the streets to a few local car shows. A Ford engineer at the Ford casting plant near Florence saw the car on highway going the opposite direction one weekend in the mid 1970s (before Ford sold the plant). Circa 1981 the owner drove the GT to a car show at Point Mallard but did not enter it in the show. He just parked in spectator parking. I was driving my Boss 302 Mustang that day.
Dr. Johnson off Pulaski Pike had a rouge iris painted Cobra he bought new and a spare aluminum transmission in a wooden crate that he ordered at the same time he ordered the car. I never knew the chassis number. Tom Odom owned drove and raced CSX2465 and he lived on Drake Avenue about a half mile or so from where I grew up. He lived just a couple of blocks from Jordan Lane. He drove the Cobra to work on the Arsenal sometimes. He sold it and bought a Chapparal (spelling?) Can-Am car that had been used in making of a movie. The camera pod was still on the car and he mounted a movie camera on it and filmed as he drove around Huntsville. In 1999 he spent the afternoon showing me movies of the Cobra and Chapparal including a movie somebody took as he drove the Chapparal through the Arsenal gate. The last time I visited Tom was in 1999 and he gave me the catalogs he use to buy street and race parts for CSX2465 directly from Shelby American.
A mechanic at one of the car dealers, cannot recall either’s name anymore, had two Cobras at the same time. He eventually opened his own car restoration business not far from Woody Anderson Ford. The owner of the news stand at Parkway City (a strip mall back then) had three Cobras at the same time. That company turned into Anderson News. The owner of a Corvette shop bought a green 427 Cobra in Atlanta at auction as theft salvage and brought it back to Huntsville and repaired it sometime before 1971, I don’t recall exactly. I bought a used Cobra emblem from him at the time and I still have it in a display case.
There was a 427 Cobra that use to street race on the causeway at the bridge in Decatur, we think the owner lived in Athens. Another 427 Cobra was wadded up into a mess south of Decatur when it struck another vehicle that was stopped. The remains of the car sat out in a field until 427 Cobra values got high enough for somebody to recreate the car from the wreck.
Tommy Andrews (Ford racer himself and helped prepare a Cobra and GT40 for Le Mans he told me.) supervised the destruction of a wrecked Cobra for an insurance company. He kept the steering wheel, engine and transmission, and the remainder was cut into pieces with that giant shear at Hines Metals. No, he had no idea what the chassis number was in 1972 when he told me about it. The engine, transmission, and steering wheel went into a hot rod build, and I did get to see the hot rod at a car show.
CSX2144 was parked at the Cabana Apartments about two blocks from our house. I went to look at it frequently. I tried to buy it for years. It was owned by an airline pilot and his lady friend lived on the second floor of the building on the right as you entered the Bayless Drive side entrance. We lived on Bayless.
The last Cobra I knew of to leave Huntsville was circa 1981. There was a red car for sale in the paper in Jones Valley. It was on an open trailer in a garage. The lighting was not great but there was plenty of evidence underneath that it had hit something and was repaired not so well. I passed and bought a Cobra I had known since 1977 in 1983 a week after we moved to Decatur.
Dan
PS. My spreadsheet indicates that I bought 1970 Boss 429 Mustang I had back then on December 6, 1974 for $1,750.00. About two days later CSX2465 was for sale in the Huntsville Times. The car was under an army surplus type canvas tarp under some pine trees on Drake Avenue. The race tires were flat, the magnesium wheels were corroded to black with white speckles, all the original street parts removed for racing were hanging on nails in a garage, and the Weberized engine and transmission had been removed and transplanted into the owner’s Fairlane. The seller was keeping the engine and transmission. The price $1,900ish. I was the first one there but I had just cleaned out my accounts to buy the Mustang and I could not afford that day to fill the fuel tank of the Mustang. No, he would not trade, I asked. I believe a racer from Birmingham scooped it up later that day.