The Shelby American (Summer 2022)

owned twenty Cobras and fifteen of them had been driven in anger and abused. When I say abused, I mean they needed a lot of body work. They weren’t creampuffs, let’s put it that way. SAAC: So, you basically learned your way around these cars on your own. SERB: I did. SAAC: The Cobra is a fairly sophisti- cated car to start working on by your- self without any frame of reference. SERB: It was a real challenge. I knew how to weld. That’s what I learned in college. So I put the car back together. I took the rear clip and put it on the new chassis and started putting it all back together. Stewart Hall was, at the time, working out of his garage and he put the front clip back on. That’s how I got my first car together. SAAC: It sounds like you always had a Cobra after that. SERB: Yes. I’ve always had a Cobra since June of 1974. SAAC: When we held our first conven- tion in 1976 in Oakland you created the multi-media slide show we had at the Saturday evening program. It was something that, at that time, was so far out of the ordinary than it left an impression on everyone who saw it that they’ve never forgotten. Forty-six years later people who saw it still talk about it. It was before power-point pre- sentations and the widespread use of computers. SERB: It was big. It had a big screen and a big sound system. That helped a lot. That’s what I was doing for a liv- ing, so it wasn’t that hard for me. SAAC: It certainly impressed every- one who was there. We recall that there was a tiny glitch when you played it, in the timing of the music and slides. Nobody noticed it, but it was probably magnified for you. Wasn’t there some kind of a power surge when they turned the dishwash- ers on in the kitchen? SERB: Yeah. That thing was run by a computer and, as you can imagine, it was quite ancient by today’s stan- dards. It was very sensitive to power. As time went on, we got better and better but those early ones were really tough. It was totally analog. Nothing like today. SAAC: After showing it, we remember you saying that you would play it one more time if anybody wanted to stick around to see it again and no one in the room moved a muscle. SERB: That’s right. [ NOTE: To provide some kind of idea about this presentation, the screen was 36-feet by 12-feet and used rear- screen projection with 14 carousel slide projectors. The slides were se- quenced to the sound track by inaudi- ble pulses, sometimes showing one giant, full-screen image, other times a split screen with two photos, other times four, eight or sixteen different slides showing at the same instant. There was a narrated script with background music and vocals like Glen Campbell’s “Country Boy” which The SHELBY AMERICAN Summer 2022 39