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It’s another one of those “out of the
blue” submissions. This one arrived in
Howard Pardee’s email inbox and he
immediately passed it on to us. As
soon as we saw the photo of the red
289 Cobra we knew there was an arti-
cle in there somewhere. Harry Quack-
enboss grew up in the Bloomfield Hills
area of Michigan. It was an upscale
area where a lot of auto company ex-
ecutives lived. In high school he was
interested in cars, like a lot of us. This
was the mid-sixties and it was not un-
common for somebody’s father to come
home with a company car. Harry re-
calls that one of his friend’s father was
the chief engineer at Ford’s axle divi-
sion and he showed up with a four-
door Galaxie with a dual-quad 427
and a drag strip-ready rear axle ratio.
Another friend had a ‘64 Falcon with
the engine that had been in one of the
Comet 100,000-mile durability run at
Daytona. We’ll let Harry pick it up
from here.
ttached is a scan of a slide of a
FoMoCo company car with some
unusual options. I took the photo back
in 1965 and it got saved away in a
cardboard box. About two years ago
my nephew was going through some
old stuff my mother had. He scanned
the picture and sent it to me, asking
who the kid was by the fender.
As soon as I saw the picture I re-
membered taking it, and carefully
framing the dual air cleaners and the
automatic transmission lever because
The SHELBY AMERICAN
Spring 2016 58
Wonder what it was like to grow up in the right place at the right time?
— Harry Quackenboss
A