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The SHELBY AMERICAN
Summer 2016 8
GOT SOME EXTRA TIME ON YOUR HANDS ?
THE REVS DIGITAL LIBRARY IS WAITING
For starters, how about browsing
a file consisting of 1,559 period photos
of Cobras and Shelbys? That’s where
we saw this photo of Dan Gerber’s
5R099. He painted it red in 1966.
Sports car collector Miles Collier,
scion of a family estimated by
Forbes
magazine to be worth north of $2.3 bil-
lion, is the grandson of a New York ad-
vertising magnate who, in the 1920s,
owned 1.3 million acres of prime prop-
erty along Florida’s southwest coast,
where Naples and surrounding Collier
County stand today.
Miles Collier’s father and uncle
(Miles and Sam, respectively) were au-
tomobile enthusiasts in the 1930s and
founded the Automobile Racing Club
of America which later became the
Sports Car Club of America. The
younger Miles grew up interested in
cars and racing and competed, him-
self, from the late 60s through the late
1980s. He founded the Collier Automo-
bile Museum in Naples, Florida in
part to house his growing collection of
historical automobiles.
The museum was opened to not
only display the cars it housed but as
a center for research. However, they
discovered that the museum portion
One of Collier’s goals was to
change the way colleges and universi-
ties saw the role of the automobile. As
Collier described it, “
The automobile is
an agent of social change; an impor-
tant technological object of the 20th
century and a lens through which to
view the trajectory of modernity.
”
Collier approached four premier
private research universities in the
U.S. with the possibility of teaming up.
All of the schools expressed interest
and he ended up selecting Stanford.
“
They are preeminent in the humani-
ties and in the engineering sciences,
”
Collier said, “
and they come from the
land of the automobile, California
.”
Stanford has its own automotive stud-
ies department and a strong computer
sciences department, which is digitiz-
ing all of the periodicals, photos and
books Collier has collected and is
adding them to its existing collection.
To visit the Revs Digital Library,
you should make sure you have a lot
of free time because you will be spend-
ing more of it than you can possibly re-
alize. The photos come from different
sources and because many were taken
by amateurs, they have rarely been
seen before. That is precisely what
makes them so interesting.
https://revslib.stanford.edu/?q=shelby&search_match=any&utf8=%e2%9C%93
was keeping a lot of research from
being done, so it was closed to the pub-
lic until they could reestablish its pri-
mary mission: to promote interest in
the automobile as the single most im-
portant technological object of the
20th century. They lost track of time
and the closing lasted twenty years. It
reopened as the Revs Institute (Re-
searching the Evolution of Vehicles in
Society); the museum is open three
days a week and the other days are re-
served for actual research.
5R102 driven by Ron Dykes at Vacaville, California, September 11, 1966.