The Shelby American (Summer 2022)

t always starts with a dream. You’re not born with dreams; they develop over time where they co- exist with reality in some sort of dy- namic balance, pushing and pulling on each other in an effort to prevail. Re- ality is the more powerful force. After all, it exists – which is why reality is the place where dreams go to die. For all of us, a few dreams persist and as time passes, some become “wants,” a few become “needs,” and way fewer still are “realized.” With that in mind, we recently sat down with Allen Grant to discuss his dream of becoming a race car driver, and the path that led him to Shelby American. In 1774 five Grant brothers, some with their families, landed in New York City as part of the great Scotch- Irish migration of protestants out of Scotland, many through Ireland. Some 200,000 Scotch-Irish left the old coun- try between 1710 and 1775 and landed on our shores; and many more emi- grated to Canada. Allen Grant’s ances- tor married the daughter of a British Army surgeon during the Revolution and at the conclusion of the war he was offered a land grant in Ontario on the north side of the St. Lawrence River. A few generations later Allen’s great grandfather, Jacob Francis Grant, came back across the border to work as a woodsman in northern Wis- consin. About 1869 he moved south- west to Cottonwood County, Minnesota eventually settling in Win- dom, a small farming community southwest of Minneapolis. Grandfa- ther George Grant was born in a sod dugout along the Des Moines River and farmed the land. His son, Wilbur Elliot Grant was also born in Windom and it was there that he would marry Vivian Thompson in 1937 and the young couple would rent a farm. She taught school while Wilbur Grant farmed. Curtis Robert Grant was born in 1939 followed 18 months later by Allen Richard Grant (born in Octo- ber,1940). One day in the fall of 1942 dad got his tractor stuck out in the field, walked back to the farmhouse and announced he had heard that there was plenty of shipyard work in San Francisco and he was going out west by train to investigate the situa- tion. He soon returned with a job offer as a welder from the Marin Shipbuild- ing Division of W.A. Bechtel, in Sausal- ito, California. As an aside, and unimaginable in this day, the shipyard was built on shore land bought from the North- western Pacific Railroad, augmented with private land.Work commenced in the spring of 1942; the private land owners had two weeks to vacate their property before the neighborhood and two surrounding hills were flatted and 840,000 cubic yards of fill were pushed onto the mud flats to level the 200- acre site. Another 3,000,000 cubic yards of bay mud were displaced out of the near-shore and a channel to get the big ships launched and moved out in San Francisco Bay. Amazingly, the first keel was laid 90 days after the project was started. Marinship, as it became known, saw peak employment of 20,000 workers (25% women, think “Rosie the Riveter”) in three shifts, The SHELBY AMERICAN Summer 2022 56 – Brooks Laudin blaudin@hotmail.com I Although Allen Grant only raced CSX2128 four times, he is probably best remembered for driving the yellow roadster. He drove a Daytona Coupe more, especially in Europe, but the Coupes all looked alike and no one driver really stood out. The Coventry Motors Cobra stood out and that was the purpose of painting it yellow in the first place.