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Old 11-02-2007, 02:45 PM
Historybuff Historybuff is offline
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Default Building an estate for heirs, isn't that legitimate?

While this thread has many legitimate criticisms of The Old Man
you hafta admire a guy who, at an age when many of us are sitting at the nursing home trying to keep a rocking chair upright,he's in the thick of it trying to make sure that his estate has something to offer to his children, grand children and maybe even great grandchildren.
His biggest mistake was selling the name Cobra for a dollar.
His second biggest one was not patenting the shape of the 289 & 427 Cobra (he's still willing to fight that battle)
But at least now, despite those mistakes decades earlier, he's coming out swinging against those that want to constrict in any way his use of the Shelby and Cobra names. These are marketable entities and why shouldn't he--who went deep into hock in 1961 creating the first Cobra--still be No. 1 in line to collect from those who want to profit from those iconic names?
In a way he's in the same category as the James Dean family. Dean was a movie star who died before any of his 3 movies came out but his family, 50 some years later, still collects all kinds of royalties for James Dean-connected movies, coffee mugs etc. Same with the Elvis trust. So you can see why Shelby, while still on this earth, wants to lassoo his rope 'round as much of what he sees is his territory, so there will be something to pass on to his heirs.

All that being said, I hope the new entity shows the same respect for funding historical research that SAAC did because, without SAAC doing all that spadework during the years that the name Shelby was almost forgotten, the Shelby name wouldn't be worth so much now...
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