Dean Jeffries RIP

[Historybuff]

I read where Dean Jeffries passed away two days ago.
He was one of the early guys into custom cars, doing pinstriiping, flames and whole body reconfigurations. He helped Shelby by painting the first Cobra several times, so it would look like there were Cobras all over the place.
Shelby gave him a 289 with Webers which he used in the Mantaray. Ford gave him a GT40 roadster (was it AJ Foyt or some Ford executive that got it for him) in the hopes he would put it in a movie but as far as I know it never got in one. He did bring it to several events like Laguna Seca to display for Ford and to the 100th anniversary of Ford. His decades long restoration was complicated because he wanted to put a 4-cam Ford in it, convinced that Ford went down the wrong path with the pushrod version. It was fun to talk to him, how incensed he would become when he would say other customers took credit for cars he did.