We found the 1st General Lee in a scrap yard & restored it

This is where I say something clever and now play the music. I don't know how I orbit or orbit around Hazzard County, but somehow Travis Belton for years was the Dukes of Hazzard's mecca during this obsession with the TV show and flying cars. and everything that happened I realized that the first five episodes of The Dukes Hazzard were filmed in Georgia and you can still visit the sites, pretty much everything is still there, but in the early '90s and early 2000s it really still looked the same because of course the show had been filmed here in '78, so we'd come from Indianapolis and we'd just drive around and drive the General Lee's and we'd go play with the Dukes of Hazzard and of course, you know, and they say that you don't know anything to see here, but Then we wanted to find the people who worked on the show and we would actually make these beautiful little Flyers with the wanted posters like if you were here this day when the car blew up, call this number or anything else and we put them in little restaurants and where the cars were flying there are obviously telephone poles and stuff, we would take this 20 foot ladder and put up the sign that says if you were here on this day, blah, blah, blah, when the car It flew and people called, they said yes, they stuck it out.

A school bus came up that day just to throw the car down the street and mom and dad were so mad because I was late for school and they had all these great stories and then we started finding the people who painted the cars in and around Conyers. Georgia and Covington and Snellville Georgia and all these other places and then we

found

the transportation directors and they said oh no, now we have these gold dying people and we had this guy, his name is Don shish ler and Don Shuster won awards from The academy. and he was a second unit director and cinematographer and he had no reason to be nice to me.

I was just an idiot who was obsessed with the Dukes of Hazzard and I walked into this lot where there are all these camera cars and there are these little short buses yellow school buses and a bunch of blue Ford Taurus and some of them had the front end ripped off um one It had all four wheels off and I was like, what the hell has come out of God's green earth? Present it. I said all of these. said movie road trip Sean William Scott them whatever and I said, yeah and he said these are all Road Trip tourists there are short buses we have to crush all these things and get paid for them.

I'm like this guy is amazing. and I'm going to tell me about the Dukes or tell me I'm all this but he said well, on December 23, 1978 he had 51 vehicles in total after five episodes of Dukes of Hazzard and I asked him what you did with them. he said there is a transmission recycling store in Dawsonville Georgia and his name is Shaw Recycling and I called Cliff Shaw two days before Christmas 1978 and he came to pick it all up I said everyone he said everyone I say well when was it the last time? The time you talked to Cliff Shaw he said that the 23rd is December 1978 and I go, it's time for a fairer year, so come on, as sure as if this guy hadn't been entertained enough by this idiot who's obsessed with Dukes of Hazzard after Don.

Schiller had driven all these Queen Family Truckster Z trucks. Since then, National Lampoon's had this terrible black suburban with a turret on the roof and it was from a terrible, terrible Cindy Crawford Baldwin's bad brother movie and this was the Russians of the bad guy's car, but now that was his car, so we all got into the terrorist suburb and headed towards Dawsonville Georgia and he tells us this story that Cliff Shaw and the Shaw family live in this beautiful part of Dawsonville Georgia, right in the end. Bill Elliott Store Street, but there's a nuclear location on the locomotive, but it's buried down the road from Camp Lumpkin in Dawsonville, Georgia, and not many people live there because of this thing, and I think we're in God.

He's taking us to the green land and he knew exactly where he lived, so we went up this hill or up this country road. I mean, you can imagine in your mind and to the left with this gravel road going up. going up the hill to this smaller house, but there were cars everywhere as far as the eye could see, all the way uphill and every make and model you can imagine is older, but what mythical junk

yard

s are made of only trees that they grow through them. and everything, we're just looking for remains of the Dukes of Hazzard, we knock on the door up there, the lady walks through the door and says a cliff, sha, blah, blah, cliffs, he hasn't gotten home from work yet and hey, Donna, sure and dawn breaks on the way there.

He said, look, I'm going to control traffic for you if they say it's here and you just start walking in his

yard

to see if you can find this thing, we're talking acres. I decided to step in and say, hey, we're looking. For Dukes of Hazzard stuff of all things, remember Mr. Schussler here was in Ava, oh you know, little family gathering there and she's going to pick up your old Dodge Charger car and I think she could have said bad guy car, she could have said police cars, she could have said Chief . Hogg's Cadillac, she could have said anything, but yeah, we're looking for the old Dodge Charger and she goes.

If you walk back down the driveway at the second Pinto, note that you are not the first, turn left and start walking towards the road. and I turned on a video camera and there was a green 1969 Dodge Charger and on the first episode of Dukes of Hazzard they jumped. Lee won Roscoe's police car and of course it didn't land well, but the shop would remove the doors. They removed it because it saved them from having to paint old ones on another car and they removed everything they could use, but then another episode of Dukes of Hazzard required a wrecked race car, so they repainted the first one usually green and gave it 71 .I put it up and I put John Morinda on the roof who was the transportation coordinator so I

found

the Dukes of Hazzard first overall while walking and the door was welded on one side and Dawn on the other side and it's orange where the door jamb is and the roll cage is still mostly there.

There is a VIN number that is X P 29, blah, blah, blah. I need some strange charger and there are some, you know, label maker, says L ee1, so I knew I had found the first one overall. the Dukes of Hazzard with a Los Angeles parking sticker still on and all this other stuff, what do you do? Do you know that you are the biggest Dukes of Hazzard of any zip code you can find? So the old cliff comes home. I heard him drive faster. I walk up the driveway and I'm down there trying to keep my tongue in my mouth.

Corn and this thing is a mess, it has more pine needles than any National Forest. You can think about the engines in it, the transmissions in it somehow and it's, you know, still orange where it's supposed to be, it still has a 71 on it, you open the trunk and it still has all the concrete in the trunk from when they jumped the car because it was a big block car and they jacked it up. the middle of the car and of course the nose would be heavy so they put quikrete concrete on it until it was level and that's how they made ballast in the back of the car and that's how the

general

lees flew and that's why I didn't put it on Nose first so I walked down the driveway and I just can't believe all the things.

I was expecting a bad guy car, anything but the General Lee. I found the first General Lee, so Cliff was interesting. He is very good. old, super nice gentleman, I said, hey, cliff, the old Dodge turned the green one down the street and goes, oh, the General Lee, my cow man, you know, I think when he thinks it's just a beat up old race car that I knew it was General Lee. I'm like damn and he's like well, Roscoe's two police cars were over the hill. I say, oh, you've got to be kidding me, sure enough, over the hill past the goats, Roscoe, both police cars, police one and two, sitting there, I come back and It was getting a little dark and haggard Don and he had his family reunion with he.

He had handled traffic like he said he was going to do it for me and I said hey overall for sale like I can get all this out of here now the grandson pushes his grandkids to the Dukes of Hazzard and I'm like yeah , but this is a disaster, and he said, well, don't write down any amount of money and it's our Travis, you have a safe trip home, now you know. whatever, I knew his grandson's name and I knew his address, so I went home and started a little plan on how the heck to get this car, so every two or three weeks, two or three months, I would send something to his grandson by mail. little overall three car package Roscoe pewter Erina's car anything else mailed autographed photo of John Schneider and in the mail ID make a call but every six months and I say oh we sure appreciate your quote AK sir loves this and is indifferent to that and no problem, so after learning about the model kits and just mailing it in, I called his wife on a Friday and said, hey, Zack got a little Daisy Jeep or whatever and She said, oh yeah, we sure appreciate the Easter you're on.

Are we already putting it together now or XYZ finally had enough after about 810 months a year of doing this, it's time to ask if we can buy the car again, so I said, hey, I'd sure like to go down and talk to Cliff about that car. Oh. Yeah, if you're ever in the area, you should come, stop by and that's my green light, that someone approved me to go there and talk about that car, so I immediately called my friends in South Carolina and they told me. a flatbed truck and they didn't live too far away and I had another friend in Chicago.

I didn't have a trailer at the time and I said I don't care what it costs, just go down here and this was a Friday and Friday turned into driving all night, all day and Saturday night, we went down Lumpkin Campground Road or where is the nuclear locomotive and here comes mr. Shaw down the driveway in an astro van and this driveway of course is going up the hill and it's gravel and nothing stops well on the gravel it stops and I said hey cliff hey June I'm here to talk to you about this car and cliff turned into some guy I didn't know and they yelled at me like I was their son and I don't work on Sundays who told you to come here and I was like well Jun just told me on Friday that Dalia came and she says yes and he's very religious the man doesn't work on Sundays he won't have anything to do with a Yankee walking around his property and I said, well cliff, I drove all night and I really want to talk to you about this car. and he rolled up the windows, said he's buried back there, you can see what you can do and that was my green light.

I didn't know I had a tow truck around the corner, so we moved a bunch of cars and it was raining. and it was on the hill and it wasn't good and we got Lee one on a flatbed ticket with big old railroad ties and we got it up there and we got it out and we parked it there at the end of his driveway and it took us hours, but He was at church, I saw him coming back down the road and I don't know if he's going to tell me to fly a kite, get this thing out of here, what are you doing on my property?

And he walked past us and up the driveway and I'm like oh mr. Shaw's off so everyone's looking at me like let's do it you gotta go talk to him Travis about my friend I'm this guy's God okay so it all comes down to the monkey here and he said , Travis, I apologize for being so sick. Today the NASCAR race starts, why don't you come here and sit and watch this with me and we talk about that car. He must have had some religion in the church. I felt bad about that and I was like, “Okay.” so i mean mr.

Scholes and we go watch the NASCAR race and we get up there and there's a TV outside and then, you know, a TV box and a little picnic table now, after watching a couple laps of this race, I thought, you know Cliff, I really have a ride home, I said, I want to talk to you about what I'm going to give you for this car, he said, well, I'm offering to be the astute negotiator that I am. I handed him a pin and told him to write a number on your hand I'm going to write a number on my hand and we're going to turn it over and whatever we're apart of, then we know we're going to start so I had three eyes looking over his shoulder at what he was going to do. write in me and mr.

Shah didn't even think about it, so I wrote $300 on my hand. You could have told me. I could have told him $30,000 for the car I had no idea. He passed his hand. I turned my hand. He wrote $500 on his hand. so I bought the first Dukes of Hazzard General Lee for $400 and then he told me you can also have the other police cars for the same money, so we're talking $1,200 for the three original Dukes police cars of Hazzard. Hazzard, so we brought it home, kept it in its '71 green paint and it was known on the TV show as Richard's wrecked race carRichard Petty and we kept it that way for a long time, but people started taking the paint off. because they wanted a souvenir of the first General Lee, we chose the Patton roll bar, you couldn't take it anywhere because it's painted with lead paint and the Dukes of Hazzard fans let their kids ride this thing and it was probably just the three of them.

They're probably already dead from being inside that thing, so it was a disaster, it was very, very bad and four Dukes collectors from Ohio contacted me and said, Travis, would you sell the first

general

? Yeah, you know, everything is for sale, what would you like? and they made me a good offer. I divided the money faithfully and a man of his word with my friend from Chicago drove a trailer there and did half of it, it was no longer my car and I didn't have to worry about a thing. More and another gentleman called said Travis I'm in the general market because for some reason the Dukes of Hazzard mecca was in Indianapolis and my name was all over the message boards and I had found the first General Lee and I was organizing all this stuff , but he wanted a real car and I told him, man, there were 17 reales generally left in the world, they are all in various conditions, they are very expensive, they are very impossible to drive because this is what you know, if you want something to drive and go to your car shows, don't buy, but he was adamant about the same time some guys from Ohio called back and said they broke it down or whatever and they wanted to sell the car again, so I called the gentleman in Florida who he wanted a real General Lee and I told him Lee was for sale and he said give me the phone number and he called me back he said I bought it they will have it for you.

I already wired them the money, just go to Ohio, pick it up and I'll go. I don't want this car. back, I mean, so he flew in from Florida. I wouldn't pick up the car we met at Indianapolis International Airport. He came and saw what he bought, which wasn't the best car in the world, it still looked exactly as it did. like I found it in Cliff Shaw's garden and said, well, what are you going to do with this? He said, well, you're going to restore it and I told him I have no desire to restore this.

Travis said, if someone painted everywhere. the Mona Lisa, someone would have to fix it and that someone is you and I think it's quite heavy. The entourage. His plane ticket was for about three hours in Indianapolis to convince me to restore the first General Lee. This car had fallen over. out of the sky and landed on the asphalt 8310 days before I found it, the transmission tunnel had collapsed on itself, it was a disaster, but it still had its transmissions and its engine still had a lot of stuff in it, so I started writing checks. and we hired a body shop we found a completely junky 69 Dodge Charger but in good sheet metal, we saved what we could save from the other, we actually rebuilt the original engine and then we

restored

it li1 but we did not restore it to showroom condition, we restore it.

It was left as it appeared on Saturday November 11, 1978 when it blew up and the decals were crooked because whoever put the decals on the door that day but crooked because they followed the wrong line of the car so we went ahead and rebuilt the car and it ran and drove and I still had a broken windshield and I had a broken windshield at the show and the parking sticker was there and overall we had number one again on the road, but the most famous rug is on every obstacle pack of is on the air, it's the only one that had chrome rocker panels throughout the show and it's there, so we had the car and we had it for a while.

He took it back to Florida for a minute and put it in the DuPont Museum registry. there and I really fell in love with it, so it was time to sell it. He asked if we would represent the car again, which you know, we have no problem with that and we will take it to Barrett-Jackson and for those of you who have had an experience with the Barrett-Jackson food guy and it will end on Saturday at the big night and everything else and whatever so my friend Jim came out to represent the car and he has, if not just as well, more knowledge and not the dukes of hazzard than me and just to walk in Ex cyclopædia I learned more from him than most people who appeared on the show, he's there representing the car and I got to DJ, so now what I would say I got to do.

DJ I worked at a club called Boogie Nights for nine years. I had a 426 plate, so I have a full afro with horror glasses, a Harlem Globetrotters uniform and it's Saturday night and I'm looking at like a thousand people and I got this. a little TV in the DJ booth and this car is about to be sold and he called me Jim and he called me and told me there was this little guy, well dressed, nice, really interested in this car and I'm the one who's going to sell. that, you know, I don't care who it is, that's all we need for people to start a bidding war for this thing, get on stage and start flying, you know, 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 thousand and this He's a luthier's disc jockey who had just

restored

a car and had made over a hundred thousand dollars.

We don't have to restore cars. We're just fans of Dukes of Hazzard. The moment he reached a hundred and ten thousand dollars, he crashed into a wall. did there It was a and they're asking for bids like, you know, someone gave me ten dollars like it was ridiculous, but there was a bid from the Sky Box and that Sky Box was the ultimate winner and the moment he put in his card, everyone was They stopped and Everybody got out of his way and it was very strange to see what happened, but I bought the car for $400, so I made it to 110 thousand of my four hundred dollar investment and I found out that it was Bubba Watson and that he lives. in Scottsdale and he's local, but he's a super nice guy.

PGA golf, he's just a fantastic, fantastic guy and couldn't have gone to a better person. A lot of people are like Travis, aren't you upset? This only served for whatever and was in a Rails I am a disc jockey and a disc jockey and a loose air restored the first in general and we are fans and we just made the cart it sold for one hundred and ten thousand dollars of my investment of four hundred dollars that I was dancing the dance club like the frog from Warner Brothers. I was very happy when the car left and went.

Bubba would email me from time to time and I would send him some videos of when we restored it and t-shirts and everything else, but then he would appear on a YouTube channel or some other show and I could recite the history of the car, so I was a student of the car, so he couldn't have passed for a better person and he has since restored a few things. things to make it his car because now it's his car and he's allowed to do whatever he wants with it, so some things I didn't expect was the backlash from Dukes of Hazzard fans who couldn't believe that I would destroy. the first General Lee that was going to cut this car completely and transplant it and it's a replica of the first General Lee and it's not the first car anymore and it was like go but it's running on the drivetrain that it flew in and all the sheet metal It's from 1969 so I restored the car but it's a replica so I didn't do it and there were just threads and angry people and I said, "Oh my God, so you remember in the The day the Statue of Liberty had all the scaffolding everywhere, they remodeled the entire Statue of Liberty, but they still call it the Statue of Liberty, so even if you restore it it's still the same: we just destroyed Hollywood history, but it was my $400 investment and they could they would have bought it for the same amount of money if they had found it.

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