[A-Snake]

[i]Since we are on the subject of the Registry, has everyone with a Registry ever read the chapter on the 'Evolution Of The Registry' beginning on page 7?
Does everyone know there have been a total of six Registry printings dating back to 1973? The chapter on the Evolution Of The Registry will also be updated in the next book.

One portion of the update will be the expanded story of how Howard Pardee discovered that Ford's archives had records on Shelbys and Cobras. He visited them a couple of years in a row, between Xmas and New Years when he was back home in Ohio. He made an appointment (anyone can do that but it's mostly writers and researchers). Everything is inventoried and catalogued. There are literally millions of documents stored in the building in which Model Ts were originally made. It covers one square block. They use golf carts to get around, and there are multiple floors. Howard called and set up an appointment. They had a pallet of boxes waiting for him when he got there at 8 am. They were in a room with a desk, chair and a copier. He could copy whatever he wanted but the originals could not leave the room. Howard stayed there all day, until 5 pm when they closed. He said there were more documents than he could look at, much less copy one page at a time. He was overwhelmed. He copied what he could (anything with a serial number on
it) in the first few boxes. There wasn't time to do much else.

Evidently every year they go through the documents that have been there for 10 years and review whether they want to keep them another 10 years or trash them. The archivist was schooled as a librarian and she realized the value of these documents if only she could find the right person. A guy writing a book on 1940's Jeeps discovered a pallet of boxes which were mis-identified. They were records from Shelby from 1963-1967. When this was discovered it was decided to toss them out. But instead of doing that she called Howard (whom she happened to remember from his previous visits). She asked him if he wanted them. The terms were that they were not for sale but he could not divulge where and how he got them (because they did not want a mob of others hounding them for discarded documents). He had to pick them up on the loading dock on a certain day.

Howard flew to Detroit where he was met at the airport by David Eber who was living there. He had an enclosed trailer. They went to the archive center and loaded the 24' trailer with about 60 boxes of documents and drove back to Howard's place in Waterford. It was in the winter.

The registrars were invited to his garage where everyone dug into the boxes, literally thousands of pages, and separated it all into stacks by car- Cobras, and various years Shelbys. Anything that had a serial # on it. The registrars took their stacks home, made copies, and eventually returned the originals (most were copies themselves) to Howard.