Carroll Hall Shelby was born on January 11, 1923. His parents were Warren Shelby, a rural mail carrier in Leesburg, Texas and Eloise Lawrence. They moved to Dallas seven years later where Carroll graduated from high school. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps and served out World War II as a flight instructor and test pilot. In the middle of the war he got married and started raising the first of his three children. At the end of the war he mustered out as a Second Lieutenant.

He went into business running a small fleet of dump trucks and then decided to get into the oil business where he started at the bottom, a roughneck. After a few years he took an aptitude test that showed that he was cut out for raising animals, so he went into the chicken raising business. His second batch of broilers caught Newcastle's disease and they all died ending his animal husbandry career in bankruptcy.