The teen saw Shelbys in the dealership, but it was not until he was driving behind a ’68 in his mildly hotrodded ’59 Chevy that he felt the urge to buy one. He followed it into a Lou Bono’s BBQ restaurant, captivated by the car’s sequential turn signals, a feature of the 1965 Thunderbird taillights used on 1968-1970 Shelbys.
“When I saw those, I immediately thought, ‘That’s my car,” he remembers.
That summer, Sizemore had money from his job and from selling his Chevy. Because he’d earned a full two-year athletic scholarship to Florida Junior College, his parents approved his using the $1500 they’d saved for his education toward a car.
“My mom helped talk my dad into letting me buy a Shelby, but he would not allow a GT500 KR,” Sizemore says. “I guess he figured I’d hurt myself, and he was probably right.”
That July, Southside Ford still had a half-dozen ’68 models on the lot. The young man picked a GT350 with the automatic transmission but without air conditioning.
“I knew that the A/C would take a little bit of horsepower when it was on, and I didn’t want to give up any. I regretted that decision every Southern summer since!”
At college in Florida, Sizemore became an All-American in cross country and two years later earned a full scholarship at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The Shelby went with him. His girlfriend, Cathy, also attended UA and owned a 1967 Mustang six-banger hardtop with a three-speed stick. The couple married in 1970 and recently celebrated their 55th anniversary.
With his accounting degree, Sizemore first worked for a Jacksonville CPA firm and picked up extra cash working in his dad’s gas station on weekends. He had hood stripes added to the Shelby, saying the shop did “a halfway decent job.”
In 1980 and with two children, Alton III and Kimberly, the family began moving around with Sizemore’s FBI assignments: Jacksonville, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Birmingham. In the Jacksonville office, a colleague spotted the 1977 Wallace Wyss book, “Shelby’s Wildlife,” on Sizemore’s desk and offered to get it autographed by Carroll Shelby through a connection. He got it back six months later, with the signature.
Sizemore’s drive from D.C. to his Birmingham assignment in 1992 was the Shelby’s last such trip.
“I met so many people in the Bureau, but even now, when I talk to someone I haven’t seen in years, the first question they ask is how I’m doing, and the second is always, ‘Do you still have the Shelby?’”
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