The Shelby American (Fall 2021)

but we really haven’t found any fac- tory documentation and there’s no one who has taken much interest in them .” So I volunteered to become the Special Paint Guru and do some re- search on them. After the convention I wrote to the owner and said I really liked the car. At the time I saw the car I said to my wife, “ We really need to buy this car. ” And she said, “ There’s only a couple of problems with that. One, you already have a ‘68 Shelby and two, we don’t have $25,000 .” I said, “ Well, you certainly got me on the second one .” I wrote to the owner after the convention – he lived in Texas and I lived in Wisconsin – and he wrote back to me and said he sold the 427 motor out of the car and wanted to sell the body. I was thinking that most of these cars don’t have the original mo- tors in them anyway, and I’m not re- ally losing anything by having a non- original motor in the car, so I asked him how much he wanted and he said $12,000. The Air Force was ready to give me a pretty substantial re-enlist- ment bonus so I used that money to buy the car. And that’s how I got the orange car. SAAC: At this point you were re- searching the car and found out or- ange was a special color? DISHER: I had a copy of the build sheet. And I started doing some math and going through the Registry, trying to figure out how many cars there were with special paint. I started try- ing to track down anybody who had a special paint car, calling them or writ- ing them letters, and I came up with an estimate of 160 special paint cars. That was my best guess after several years of research. And then a guy turned up some Ford records and I got to know him pretty well, and he said there were actually 159 special paint cars. So I was off by one. I was able to track down quite a few of them. I think now there are only a few that are un- accounted for out of that 159 cars. SAAC: It’s nice that you took an inter- est in that and started to keep records. There are not a lot of discrepancies in production of the 1968 and 1969 cars; not like there was with the early Shel- bys which made some cars different from each other. Now these small dif- ferences mean something. It used to be that cars which were “different” were not as desirable, for example a car that was painted an off-color. But now it’s just the opposite; some people are at- tracted to them. With someone keep- ing track, they’re not afraid of these cars anymore. DISHER: They’ve become known quantities. SAAC: How did you become a con- cours judge? DISHER: That really started in the late 1980s. I was interested in gather- ing information on 1968 Shelbys and I just gravitated towards judging be- cause I knew those people were very knowledgeable and a lot of them were willing to share what they knew. I knew that by looking at as many cars as I could and seeing the kinds of mis- takes that other people had made restoring them, I could keep from making those same mistakes and make my restorations than much bet- ter. That’s how I became involved with the concours. SAAC: Going to the conventions The SHELBY AMERICAN Fall 2021 36 Concours judging at SAAC-37. Watkins Glen..