The Shelby American (Summer 2022)

The SHELBY AMERICAN Summer 2022 77 www.thecoralsnake.com/dealers will take you to the Shelby Dealers section of the website. It contains a list of Shelby dealers in 1968, dealer adver- tising, details and remembrances sub- mitted by people who were Shelby dealers, salesmen or service employees back in the day, photos of dealerships, a gallery of cars sold by that dealer- ship supplied by owners, and samples of dealer emblems and license plate frames. Details about Shelby dealer- ships are often overlooked in studying these cars, mainly because not very many people know much about them. After a car left the dealership, once it got on the secondary market and sold by the owner or traded to another dealer, the original dealer was no longer important. Most dealers affixed dealer badges or stickers to the back of the cars they sold as advertising. It identified the selling dealer and was a good way to get potential buyers to visit the deal- ership. In a sense, the cars, them- selves, did the advertising. Metal badges were installed onto cars by drilling two or three holes into a back panel and attaching them with screws or by pins with clasps. Pot-metal or white-metal emblem manufacturers advertised in the back of publications aimed at dealers. Some companies also produced adhesive-backed stick- ers. They eliminated the need to drill holes. Original owners often left the badges alone but subsequent owners removed them in an attempt to make the cars look “cleaner.” On the West Coast most dealers fa- vored pot-metal or white-metal license plate frames that carried the dealer’s name and location. In California, when a car was initially purchased and registered, the license plates stayed with the car. When it was sold, the license plates went with the car, so the license plate frames tended to stay on the car. Owners of California cars were used to seeing license plate frames on cars.When vanity plates be- came popular, license plates no longer stayed with the car when it was sold, but were kept by the owner who trans- ferred them to the new vehicle. Com- panies that manufactured license plate frames also advertised in dealer publications and supplied dealers with license plate frames.