Remembering Them Forever (RTF)!

Shelby, Carroll Hall

Leesburg, Texas, Camp County, United States

Military Information:

Deceased
WWII Veteran
QR Code
WWII Victory Medal
US Army Air Corps or Forces
2LT: Second Lieutenant
1-Alpha List
Celebrity: Athlete
Lone Star Merit Award (TVHOF Class of 2024)

Bio:

Early life
Carroll Shelby was born on January 11, 1923, to Warren Hall Shelby, a rural mail carrier, and his wife, Eloise (Lawrence) Shelby in Leesburg, Texas. Shelby suffered from heart valve leakage problems by age 7 and experienced health complications from this throughout his life. From a young age, Shelby had a fascination in speed, leading to an interest in cars and airplanes. He moved to Dallas, Texas at age 7 with his family, and around age ten, he would ride his bicycle to dirt tracks nearby to watch races. Eager for a car of his own, at age 15 he was driving and taking care of his father's Ford. Shelby's education as a pilot began in the military at the San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center, later known as Lackland Air Force Base, in November 1941. Prior to racing and building cars, Shelby made a living raising chickens, which he continued until 1952.

Pre-racing
Shelby honed his driving skills with his Willys automobile while attending Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas, Texas, graduating in 1940. He then enrolled at The Georgia Institute of Technology in the Aeronautical Engineering program. After enlisting in the United States Army Air Corps, Shelby began pilot training in November 1941. He graduated with the rank of staff sergeant pilot in September 1942 at Ellington Field. In December 1942 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant after undergoing air students' training, later serving as a flight instructor and test pilot in the Beechcraft AT-11 Kansan and Curtiss AT-9 Jeep. He went on to fly the Douglas B-18 Bolo, the North American B-25 Mitchell, the Douglas A-26 Invader and finally the Boeing B-29 Superfortress at Denver, Colorado, before being discharged following V-J Day.

After the war, he started his own dump truck business, worked briefly as an oil-well roughneck from 1948–49, and then as a poultry farmer before going bankrupt. By 1963, the Texas native was racing his Cobras on European tracks against Ferrari, Porsche and Jaguar teams. In 1965, he won the Grand Touring World Championship and then won LeMans in a Shelby Ford GT40 in 1966 and 1967. In later years Shelby founded Carroll Shelby International and Shelby American, a car company which unveiled its 1,000-horsepower Shelby 1000 Mustang at the New York Auto Show in June 2012.

He owned 220,000 acres in West Texas near the town of Terlingua, where he co-founded the world's first chili cook-off. Larry Levine, the founder of Chili's, was Carrol's son-in-law in the early seventies, and had gone to Terlingua's cook-offs a few times before opening the first of the now-ubiquitous restaurants in Dallas.

Shelby was married seven times; the first and last marriages lasted 15 years before divorce proceedings.

Shelby's first wife was Jeanne Fields; they married on December 18, 1943. They had three children: Sharon Anne (born September 27, 1944), Michael Hall (born November 2, 1946) and Patrick Bert (born October 23, 1947). They divorced in February 1960.

Shelby later admitted to an extramarital affair with Jan Harrison, an actress. In 1962, Shelby married Harrison, but the marriage was annulled the same year. His third marriage, to a New Zealand woman, which he entered in order to get her into the United States, lasted only a few weeks before ending in divorce. His fourth marriage, to Sandra Brandstetter, lasted a couple of years before ending in divorce.

In 1989, after 28 years of being single, Carroll married Cynthia Psaros, a former actress, beauty queen, and daughter of a retired US Marine colonel fighter pilot. During this marriage, Carroll received his long-awaited heart transplant. Their marriage lasted a few short years before ending in divorce. In the 1990s he married Helena "Lena" Dahl, a Swedish woman he had met in 1968. She died in a car accident in 1997. It was his only marriage that did not end in divorce, annulment, or separation.

Just four months after Dahl's death, Shelby married his last wife, Cleo (née Rendell-Roberts), a British former model who drove rally cars. She was 25 years his junior. They were in the process of divorce when he died in 2012.

Medical problems and death:

Shelby at Terlingua event in 2008
Shelby received a heart transplant in 1990, and a kidney transplant in 1996.

Shelby died on May 10, 2012, at the age of 89. He had been suffering from a serious heart ailment for decades. Shelby is survived by his three children, Patrick, Michael and Sharon; his sister, Anne Shelby Ellison of Fort Worth, Texas; six grandchildren, four great grandchildren and his wife, Cleo.