This ’68 Shelby GT500 KR is one that got away—and it’s probably just as well

What’s that thing I’ve read? Something about how you’re not really dead until the last person to say your name has also left the planet?

My dad’s been gone since 1996, and we four kids still remember him with great affection and more frequency than you’d expect given it’s been, let’s see … 27 years now. The photo of him and my mom on the wall has been hanging there so long I no longer really notice it, and his photo smile never did really convey the man anyway.

Sometime in 1977, during my junior year at Ruskin High School, I was walking home—which might mean my Triumph Spitfire was either down for the count again or I hadn’t acquired it quite yet. I came to the corner of Red Bridge Road and Bennington Avenue and a stunning Shelby GT500 KR convertible was gleaming at me from the wrap-around driveway of the nicest, biggest house around, with its top down and a “For Sale” sign on the windshield: $6500. If the Shelby shown here, listed early this year on Bring A Trailer, isn’t that very car, I’ll eat the white convertible top.

The first sentence of the BaT ad reads: “This 1968 Shelby Mustang GT500 KR is one of 518 convertibles produced for the model year and was built on June 26, 1968. It was delivered to Paul’s Ford Sales of Kansas City, Missouri . . .”

Tall Paul’s Ford was only about a mile down the road, and it’s hard to imagine there being two of these in that skinflint part of KC. There were plenty of Mustangs around, already clapped out at 10 years old, thanks to winter salt and period modifications, but the perfect, unmolested GT500 KR I saw seemed to have nothing in common with them. It must have spent all its time in the garage, or I surely would have seen it before. At that time, I was more of a Camaro guy, but seeing it there for sale, I was suddenly willing to rethink.

In my mind’s eye, I think it was spring, because I remember the patches of snow on the driveway that set off the red paint, just like in the BaT ad. The convertible top was down to reveal the racy black roll bar that KRs came with.

Soon as Pops rolled in from work in his AMC Ambassador, I laid it on him. “Dad! You have to buy this Shelby Mustang GT500 KR convertible!” I knew he was shopping for a new car anyway. In those days, you kind of had to buy a new car every few years, as they rusted away beneath you.

“Mustang?” he said in his Alabama drawl. Dad was never a Ford guy, either.

As part of my pitch, I may even have told him it would be collectible, though I doubt I really had any such idea at the time. I just wanted to drive around in the thing—who wouldn’t? “Dad, it’s a 428 Cobra Jet! With A/C and a power top! And it’s red and looks brand new!”

“How much?” he asked.

“Only $6500!”

He took a long pull from his evening vodka tonic, fixed me with one eye and said, “There’s no way in hell I’m paying no sixty-five hundred dollars for no ten-year-old Mustang.” He liked to revert to the vernacular when making certain declarative points.

I think I knew that would be his reaction, but I had to put it out there anyway, just in case. We needed cars to drive, not to collect, and Dad had a history of buying vehicles that didn’t really lend themselves to emotional attachment. Maybe I did sense the KR would be collectible some day, because by 1977 Ford was slapping the Mustang name on some truly atrocious little automobiles, which made even us Chevy dudes long for the ’60s. But even back in ’77, if you shopped around you could find nice used Camaros and Chevelles and the like for around two grand. So $6500 really was a lot of money, even for a new car. And with four kids to feed on one income, we weren’t a wealthy family. Just wealthy enough to tithe to St. Mary’s every Sunday, though. It was a different time for sure, and Dad was a completely different, less materialistic animal than his oldest son. Must have been a Depression-era thing.

He wound up trading the Ambassador for a Plymouth Volare wagon with the slant-six, which Google tells me had a base price of $4241. Yet another hair shirt of a vehicle, produced in that terrible era when Detroit hadn’t uncorked the fuel-injection genie and was still trying to make carburetors work with emissions equipment. My poor dad was no mechanic; I learned by doing and may even have introduced him to interchangeable parts. Look, Dad, it’s easier to just buy a new carburetor than to take the whole car to Jerry’s Conoco all the time to try to make that one work.

I was excited as you’d expect when I got the red Triumph Spitfire, followed immediately by being crushed that it was all topped out at about 80 mph. How can a thing look so fast and . . . not be? I got rid of it and followed up with an $1800 hopped-up ’67 SS396 Chevelle, which turned out to be neither an SS nor hopped-up. I had to save up another $600 to get its engine rebuilt; then it really was a beast both of my parents feared. At 18, however, I lacked their grim imagination.

A few short years after we didn’t buy the Mustang, the Army sent me to California, then Colorado, Texas, and Germany. When I finished school, I landed a job at Cycle magazine that moved me to California for good. I started my own family and may have made it back to KC six or 10 times in the next few decades, two of them for my parents’ funerals. One of our regular reminiscences was the red Mustang we didn’t buy. I’d tell my dad what it was currently worth (that it sold in February for $211,000 tells me I might have been on to something). He’d counter with something along the lines of: “You would’ve wrapped it around a telephone pole anyway.” He wasn’t wrong. But first I would have installed headers, glasspacks, traction bars, air shocks, and fuzzy dice.

I’m convinced that BaT Shelby GT500 KR was our GT500 KR, and seeing it pop up on my computer screen was like seeing Dad’s young ghost. That night, I dreamt of the two of us rolling down Red Bridge Road in it with the top down.

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