Personal Life
Carroll Shelby was born on January 11, 1923 in Leesburg, Texas, to Warren Hall Shelby, a rural mail carrier, and his wife Eloise Lawrence Shelby. Shelby suffered heart valve leakage problems by age 7 and spent most of his childhood in bed. By age 14, Shelby's health improved and he was subsequently declared to have "outgrown" his health problems. Shelby's first wife was Jeanne Fields; they married on December 18, 1943. Their daughter Sharon Anne Shelby was born a year later on September 27, 1944. They had two more children — sons named Michael Hall (born November 2, 1946) and Patrick Bert (born October 23, 1947). Shelby and Fields later separated and divorced in February 1960.
Shelby dealt with health issues throughout his life. He took nitroglycerine pills when he was racing because of his heart. He had 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. Joe Conway, president of Carroll Shelby International, said that "we are all deeply saddened, and feel a tremendous sense of loss for Carroll's family, ourselves and the entire automotive industry. There has been no one like Carroll Shelby and never will be. However, we promised Carroll we would carry on, and he put the team, the products and the vision in place to do just that."
Read more about this topic: Carroll Shelby
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people. To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Normally, the sciences distance themselves from life and the return to it via a detour.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)