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town of Hanover, Pennsylvania. It sat
on the front row of Roy Bream’s used
car lot. After watching this car for sev-
eral months my brother Tom and I de-
cided to purchase that car. When we
got there the car had already been
sold. I found out later that a farm boy
named Dickie Poole fromWestminster,
Maryland had bought the car. He
owned it for more than forty years.
This past summer, in 2018, I met
three people pertaining to this Hertz
Shelby. The first was Buddy Bream,
the owner of the car lot and the guy
who had sold the car fifty years ago.
The second was Gary Taylor, who had
hauled corn for Poole and would often
use the Shelby to shuttle back and
forth to work. The third was a gentle-
man who remembered seeing the
Shelby sitting at the Top Hat restau-
rant in Westminster, one of the local
hangouts in the early 1970s.
Sometime later, still browsing the
newspapers, I found an advertisement
in the
Baltimore Sun
for a 1966
Shelby and a 1967 Shelby at Schmit
Ford. The next day my brother and I
headed to the dealership. To our sur-
prise, inside the dealership was a
brand new, white 427 Cobra with a
price tag of $7,200. This farm boy was-
n’t about to spend all his money in one
place. Also on the showroom floor was
the car we came to look at. I didn’t
know at the time but this was the last
1966 Shelby shipped to Archway Ford
in Baltimore, on July 22, 1966. I still
have that advertisement from the
Bal-
timore Sun
.
When I saw the Ivy Green fast-
back, SFM6S2335, with no stripes I
knew this was going to be my Shelby.
It had just been traded in on a new
Bronco. I still have the salesman’s
business card. He said the Shelby had
less than 3,000 miles on it and it was
the hottest car in town. We told him
we didn’t think so – we had just
driven to the dealership in a 1960 Fal-
con powered by a 427 FE engine. The
salesman said the Shelby was origi-
nally $5,600 new. Without a test drive,
I decided to buy the car on the spot
and put down $200 to hold it. I was not
old enough to legally buy a car in
Maryland, so the next day we took my
father in to buy the car. I paid for it
with a cashier’s check from my bank.
I still have my copy of the check and
the bill of sale. The title was put in my
name; the date was March 19, 1968.
When we started driving and
working on cars, the farm chickens
had to go. After getting the Shelby
home, I cleared out a place in the
chicken house to garage it. Forty-five
years later I ran into a guy at a car
show who had worked on our farm and
he remembered seeing the Shelby
sticking out of the chicken house.
I had other cars, so I only drove
the Shelby on weekends or in good
weather. Never in the winter. One of
the guys I car-pooled with back in the
late 1960s, Jerry Bollinger, said that if
he had that car he would drive it every
day, but the Shelby was never a daily
driver. It was always driven with a
mission. One of my other cars was a
1962 Falcon Ranchero with a 427 side-
oiler. Most of the miles driven with the
GT350 were with 4.57:1 rear end
gears that were installed by the origi-
nal owner in 1967.
At one time, I used the car as a
truck and put a bare 427 block in the
trunk and ruined the gas tank. I was
taking the block to Smalls Auto Parts
in Hanover, Pennsylvania to be ma-
chined.
In 1969, I sent the supercharger
back to Joe Granatelli at Paxton and
had new bearings installed. The same
year I had white LeMans stripes
painted on the car by Larry Reed at
Parks Ford in Hampstead, Maryland.
In 1972, the original exhaust system
started giving up at the intersection of
Route 27 and Snydersburg Road in
Maryland. I still have the original Tri-
Y headers hanging in the garage.
My younger brother, Steve, had in-
herited a 1963 Falcon with a Boss 302
engine from my older brother. He got
into a traffic accident and destroyed
the car and was looking for another
brother to donate a car to him. I let
him have the Shelby, with the under-
standing that I would keep the Paxton
supercharger and when he got tired of
the car I would get it back.
Steve drag raced the Shelby in the
late 1970s at local tracks: York US 30
Dragway in York, Pennsylvania; 75-80
Dragway in Monrovia, Maryland;
Mason-Dixon Dragway in Boonsboro,
Maryland. The best elapsed time was
12.86 seconds at 106 mph without the
The SHELBY AMERICAN
Spring 2019 59