One car to rule them all. Heart pounding and head swirling, crunching pine needles in an automotive graveyard dotted with hundreds of transmission tombstones, the looming figure of Travis Bell, sporting a cue ball dome atop a 6’4” frame, walked tight on the trail of a grail.
Zeroing on his prize, Bell softly approached a near-mythical muscle car hidden for decades—the very first 1969 Dodge Charger to take flight and roar into U.S. living rooms during the premier episode of the iconic Dukes of Hazzard.
Bell’s mouth went to cotton: “I can still hear my breathing and feel my lungs getting heavy as I got closer. It couldn’t be, but it was. I stumbled over the first General Lee—the most desired and magical car in television history.”
Finding the buried relic was a feat for the ages, but keeping it hidden was a task extraordinaire.
“Sometimes I still can’t believe how it all happened from start to finish,” he adds. “Helluva ride.”
Sincerely. Bell, a maverick too wild for fiction, leaped headfirst down a wooly rabbit hole and emerged with a lost-and-found tale for the ages.
Flight of the Firstborn
The spotlight fades; the actors age; the crew dies; the audience grays; but the car goes on forever.
In 1979, CBS execs took a blinder on five episodes of a preposterous television series about farm boys who curiously never had time to farm: The Dukes of Hazzard. Narrated by the deep drawl of Waylon Jennings, Dukes revolved around a redneck family fighting county corruption. Despite swearing off moonshining and bootlegging for row cropping, cousins Bo, Luke, and Daisy, along with Uncle Jesse, were hounded by the hijinks of Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane and Hazzard County Commissioner Boss Hogg, intent on stealing the Duke farm.
Anchoring each episode, and leading every getaway, chase, and jump, was a buck-wild 1969 Dodge Charger, driven by the farm boy duo, Bo and Luke. Dubbed General Lee, and painted bright orange, with a crooked 01 (more like a backwards 10 in appearance) slapped on welded-shut doors, and a Confederate flag atop the roof, the high-flying Charger was the backbone of the show.
CBS anticipated the likelihood of Dukes success akin to snowflakes in hell, dropping the debut episode in the doldrums of winter on a Friday night at 9 p.m., Jan. 26, 1979. As the opening credits rolled to Jennings’ “Good Ol’ Boys,” five-year-old Travis Bell crawled into his father’s lap and stared at the family television in Indianapolis, Ind., roughly 550 miles away from the Duke farm and fictional Hazzard County, Georgia.
Ready to soak an hour of The Incredible Hulk, young Bell sat confused as a redneck-fest unfolded on screen. Adios to Hulk. The boy was mesmerized by its midseason replacement, the outlandish premier episode of Dukes and the birth of a cultural legend as General Lee soared 16’ high and 82’ long on its inaugural flight, a defining jump that remained in the opening of Dukes across seven seasons of airtime. (Defying mockery from latte-swilling media critics, viewership of Dukes went nuclear, exploding into mass popularity across farm country and rural flyover regions.)
However, cut from camera and the eyes of viewers, General Lee’s descent to ground came with the vengeance of physics. Carrying at least 500 lb. of concrete in its trunk to serve as flight ballast to ensure the body didn’t nose over, General Lee hit a hard landing, bending the frame and suspension, breaking the differential and cracking the windshield—for starters.
General Lee was totaled. By necessity, the car was cast aside as a rust-catcher in favor of an endless chain of 325 other orange Dodge Charger replacements used in the series. On with the show.
However, the five-year-old Indiana boy was hooked, and 25 years later, he would find General Lee. Not a General Lee, but that General Lee. The forgotten. The firstborn. Lee 1.
Or maybe, just maybe, the greatest car in television history would find him.
The White Whale of Hazzard
Volume muted, literally. Inside a house a stone’s throw from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Bell sometimes watched the races with the TV sound turned off, listening and feeling as the engines roared through the walls of his home.
Neither of his parents (both graduates of Speedway High School) were mechanically inclined. In the Bell household, broke was broke. “Nobody fixed anything when I was a kid,” he laughs. “Standard policy was, ‘Buy a new one.’”
Yet, Bell was the polar opposite of “standard.” Wrench in hand, the Midwest boy marched to a beat only he heard. If brainiacs occupied the top rung of intelligence, Bell operated a step above, a prodigy able to connect intellect to elbow grease. During extensive IQ testing at age 11, he blew away the charts, but the phenom floundered in school—bored to tears with no outlet.
In tenth grade, Bell walked away from high school and into the university of hard knocks and rough roads. He wasn’t merely an out-of-the-box individualist. Bell tore the box into pieces and burned it. The “dropout” with an extraordinary internal engine would go on to found Celebrity Machines, attain legendary DJ status, rub elbows with the rich and famous, collect or sell countless TV and movie cars, and gain industry-wide respect in the gearhead world.
By the mid-90s, three paces ahead of the crowd, Bell held tight to first love: The Dukes of Hazzard. Behind the comfortable wheel of a Buick Century, he began making pilgrimages to Covington, Georgia, where the first five episodes of Dukes were shot—the same general area that has hosted production of Cannonball Run, My Cousin Vinny, Remember the Titans, Sweet Magnolias, In the Heat of the Night, and Vampire Diaries.
“At that point in time, everything in Covington pretty much still looked the same as it had back in the late 1970s,” Bell notes. “I had no plan, other than to find the locals that worked on the show and hear their stories. I was trying to learn everything I could about the magic car that flew.”
“Sometimes we’d go down to the filming locations in Conyers, Covington, or Snellville, and put up flyers that looked like wanted posters asking for anyone that might have worked on the show or seen the General Lee fly at such-and-such date,” he continues. “I wasn’t looking to buy vehicles. How could I have even dared to dream that General Lee 1 even still existed?”
Forging friendships with original cast members John Schnieder (Bo), Tom Wopat (Luke), Catherine Bach (Daisy), and multiple stuntmen, Bell peeled back the layers of Dukes past. In 2000, neck-deep in series lore, he stumbled over the white whale of Hazzard—Lee 1. In the eyes of Travis Bell, he found the Mona Lisa.
Unlocking the Mystery
Ask Bell a question, and receive a raconteur’s answer packed in layers, delivered in a voice meant for radio or television. “In any part of my life, all I’ve ever had was reputation,” he says. “You either treat people right or you don’t. I’ve never been interested in someone’s color or creed, and I’ve never been interested in political correctness. I never got on my kids for using four-letter words in the house, except for one—hate. That’s about the only word I wouldn’t tolerate from them.”
And no celebrity airs or pretensions—what you see is what you get. “I learned my most important lessons in life from people who treated me nice for no real reason,” Bell adds. “Hell, that’s how Lee 1 was found.”
During Bell’s frequent hunts for Hazzard County nostalgia around Covington, one name consistently surfaced—the man responsible on set for all things vehicle-related, Dukes transportation coordinator Don Schisler.
Old-school, long-legged, silver-haired, and straight-talking, typically garbed in a flannel work shirt and jeans, Schisler was automotive royalty, with a resume studded with NASCAR commercials, Hollywood movies, and television runs.
“Don Schisler was an in-demand guy, authentic as you could get,” Bell recalls. “He was filming in Alaska when I got his number and called him. He told me he was about to return home to Georgia for four days in a row, and he’d be happy to meet me. This was the Don Schisler, and he was telling a crazy-ass Yankee that he’d be glad to share his time. One of the best gentlemen I’ve ever met, and I never forgot the lesson.”
Less than 48-hours later, Bell pulled up to Schisler’s shop on Buford Dam Road and wandered into Shangri La for car guys: blue Ford Taurus bodies and yellow mini-school buses used in the recently filmed Road Trip, booms, film equipment, and car parts galore, all fronted by a black Suburban with a gun turret in the roof—a leftover from a Cindy Crawford-Stephen Baldwin movie, Fair Game.
Rapport between Bell and Schisler was instant. Both men were natural storytellers. Both could sell ice to an Eskimo. “Looking back, I think Don somehow knew I was crazy enough to be his friend. He sat back and answered my Dukes questions and told wonderful tales, one after another.”
After knowing Schisler for all of four hours, Bell inadvertently dropped a colossal question: Do you remember what happened on Dec. 22, 1978?
“I found the man who unlocked the mystery,” Bell says, still stunned by the irony decades later. “It was a mystery I didn’t even know existed, but I was standing right on top of it.”
The Shell Game
Essentially, General Lee played a game of hide and seek, according to Schisler’s narrative.
Prior to shooting the first Dukes episode, Warner Bros. built and shipped three General Lee’s (and three police cars) from California to Georgia for filming. Each had a distinguishing label next to the VIN: Lee 1, Lee 2, and Lee 3.
By the end of filming the first episode, Schisler was almost out of functioning vehicles, including police cars and chase cars. The twisted metal mayhem of the show was intense, and to counter the losses, he built an additional three General Lee’s. Across the first five Dukes episodes, 51 cars were totaled.
On Dec. 22, 1978, filming in Georgia wrapped. Time to go home for Christmas, never to return to the Peach State, as production permanently moved to California for the remainder of the series. Therefore, all the Dukes vehicles had to go west.
Cleaning house, Schisler strapped three General Lee’s, Boss Hogg’s white 1970 Cadillac DeVille convertible, and Cooter’s brown 1969 Chevy C-10 tow truck on a trailer and sent them to California—a carnival of the bizarre for motorists on US-80 who caught site of the odd load rolling across the country.
Listening intently to Schisler’s timeline, adrenaline pumping, Bell was tumbling down the rabbit hole, astounded by the implications of the narrative. “They left Georgia with three General Lee’s and it matched up with them arriving in California with three General Lee’s,” Bell exclaims. “The math looked right, but later nobody realized the ones they returned to California with were not the ones they shipped to Georgia in the first place. It was a shell game.”
But if not sent back to California, where was Lee 1? Where had Lee 1 gone after its maiden 82’ jump and hard landing on Veteran’s Day, Nov. 11, 1978, during filming of episode 1 of Dukes?
On Dec. 22, after shipping back the remaining vehicles to California, Schisler had a dozen-plus Dukes wrecks, all makes and models, taking up lot space. Schisler called Cliff Shaw, owner of Shaw Automotive in nearby Dawsonville, and offered to trade all the Dukes wrecks in return for a couple of transmission jobs. The deal was struck. Shaw got all the wrecked vehicles.
As Schisler completed the stunning tale, Bell chimed in, mind racing. “Holy s***. Lee 1 was in that bunch of cars. Don, are you certain Cliff Shaw came and picked up those cars on Dec. 22, 1978?”
“Yes.”
“When was the last time you spoke to Cliff Shaw?” Bell followed, with two decades of hope jammed in the ask.
“December 22, 1978.”
Bell regained his composure. “How ‘bout a family reunion?”
The Second Pinto
Theater of the absurd.
Rumbling through racing country in the gun-turreted Suburban, Bell pinched himself as he rode shotgun beside Schisler toward Dawsonville and Cliff Shaw, through thick pine stretches on Lumpkin Campground Road. After roughly 35 minutes, Schisler left pavement and eased onto a steep drive of washed-out gravel, past a mailbox marked “SHAW.” The rise was the first hill on a roller coaster splitting a sea of trees, old cars, and transmissions periscoped by coffee cans, all garnished by threads of kudzu and wisteria.
Mouth agape, Bell stared in silence, absorbing the shock: “Between the trees, on one side of the driveway, all I could see was steel-bumpered cars to the horizon, mainly GM and Ford of every model from the 1960s to 1980s. Cars beside cars, maybe 400, tucked on this 30-degree slope. And on the other side of the driveway, there were countless transmissions lined up with coffee cans or soup cans covering the tail shafts, with about 100 more cars scattered around. The whole scene was covered in pine needles like brown snow.”
At the top of the drive, a 2-story home.
Spilling out of the Suburban, Schisler took the lead and knocked on the door. Cliff Shaw was working in town, but his wife, June, answered, as Schisler politely greased the skids and made intros.
Never at a loss for words, Bell played his hand. “Miss June, we’re here because of The Dukes of Hazzard. Back in 1978, Don traded Mr. Shaw a whole bunch of cars from the show.”
“Sure did,” she confirmed.
“Ma’am, do you have any cars left from the show?” Bell asked with the barest degree of expectation, assuming the vehicles had long since been crushed.
“You talking about an old Dodge Charger car with 71 on the door? Head down past the second Pinto, take a left, go back toward the road, and you’ll run into it.”
Huh? 71? 71? Bell began walking.
Cannon Fodder, No More
First Pinto, check. Second Pinto, check. Go left.
“I was carrying a video camera, filming like I always did on any Dukes-related location, but certainly not expecting to find a lost treasure in the middle of the woods in rural Georgia,” Bell recalls. “What the hell was Miss June talking about 71, anyway? But my breath was still heavy because I didn’t know what I didn’t know.”
Ducking under low-hanging branches, Bell hot-nosed the trail through the pines and stepped into a sanctum. Behold, a faded green 1969 Dodge Charger wearing a blanket of needles, resting on its frame with no wheels, 71 on one remaining door, and an empty interior, save a seat and half a roll cage.
Green? 71?
Bell stared momentarily in bewilderment—and felt his heart explode.
“It hit me,” he exclaims. “In the fourth episode of Dukes there was a green, wrecked Richard Petty race car. No doubt, this had to be that car.”
“I walked up and saw the entire driver-side door jam was bright orange. Whoahhhhh. I opened the trunk and it was filled with concrete. Whoahhhhh.”
Anticipation building and sweat pouring over furrowed brow, Bell swept away pine needles and leaned forward for a closer look. The relic revealed itself: “There it was,” he describes. “Right next to the VIN was a label that read ‘Lee 1.’ Holy s***, this green car in front of me was the first General Lee in history.”
Bell stood before a fable in physical form. Mystery solved. After its legendary jump and mangled landing in the first episode of Dukes, Lee 1 was picked for parts and then licked with a coat of green paint, slapped with 71, and repurposed in episode 4 as a Richard Petty wreck. Following the cameo, Lee 1 became cannon fodder and part of Schisler’s pile of metal traded on Dec. 22, 1978, for two transmission jobs.
Dorothy’s red slippers, George Washington’s dentures, Babe Ruth’s piano, and Secretariat’s Triple Crown saddle silk all remain lost. The holy grail of star cars was found.
Loose Lips Sink Ships
Wheels on gravel. Back from town, Cliff Shaw pulled up the driveway in an Astro minivan as late-afternoon light faded. Southern to the core, Shaw looked like Colonel Sanders minus the goatee. White hair, mustache, overalls. Highly astute and self-made.
“What a neat guy,” Bell recalls. “A decent and good man, through and through.”
Once again, Schisler made introductions as Bell and Shaw shook hands.
Bell went brass tacks: “Mr. Shaw, is anything for sale? I’m interested in that green Charger, the Richard Petty race car.”
Shaw was ready. “Oh, you mean the General Lee? No. My grandson loves Dukes of Hazzard.”
Bell’s heart dropped. He parried. “Do you have any other Dukes cars?”
Shaw pointed further up the hill. “Up there you’ll find two police cars from the show.”
Instantly, Bell walked a goat path, disappeared over a ridge, and swooned. Piling improbability on impossibility, Bell discovered the first vehicles of Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane and Deputy Enos Strate, two 1974 Dodge Monaco’s, with labels beside the VIN numbers: Police 1 and Police 2.
“It was too much shock to absorb,” Bell remembers. “I’d come down here to find filming locations and instead stumbled into a damned secret society.”
However, mirroring Lee 1, the police cars were not for sale.
Darkness descending, Bell maddeningly departed with the secret of a lifetime, unable to share the treasure with a soul.
“It was like being a Star Wars fan and finding the Millenium Falcon, but not being able to tell anyone because you know they’ll go get it,” Bell says. “I couldn’t tell anyone; I couldn’t show a picture. No talk, period.”
Loose lips sink ships.
A King’s Ransom
Back home in Indianapolis, Bell kept his powder dry. Every few months, he wrapped gifts of Dukes toy vehicles, DVDs, and autographed memorabilia from John “Bo” Schneider, and mailed the presents to Georgia for Shaw’s grandson.
“It was just something I could do to stay in contact with Cliff and show that I had no bad intentions or ill will. No matter what, I wanted to do things above board. That was the right thing to do regardless of what happened, and if Cliff ever changed his mind, I’d be at the front of the line.”
Just over a year later, Bell took another shot. He dialed Shaw’s landline number on a Friday afternoon. Miss June answered. After small talk, Bell reached: I was wondering about that car. Would I be able to come back?
“Miss June didn’t give an exact yea or nay,” Bell recalls. “She just said, ‘Come on down sometime if you get a chance and talk to Cliff.’”
Bell hung up the phone and grabbed his keys. Green light. Action. He went to the bank and withdrew $20,000. “I called a friend in Chicago who had a truck and trailer. I called a friend in South Carolina with a roll-off wrecker. Go. Go. Go. We’d all meet on Sunday, at 8:30 a.m. in Dawsonville, hell or high water for a damned car.”
Eyes bleeding after a nine-hour drive, Bell again pulled off Lumpkin Campground Road and prepared to ascend the drive toward Lee 1. However, the descent of tires on gravel beat him to the punch. Down came the Shaws in the Astro, decked in Sunday attire, heading to the church house.
Fingers crossed as the Astro stopped, Bell waved and hollered out: “Hey Mr. Shaw and Miss June. How are things this morning?”
Thunder on the mountain. Shaw was short. “Travis Bell, I don’t work on Sunday. I already told you, ‘No,’ and I don’t know why you’re even here.”
“I talked to Miss June on the phone and she said it’d be OK if I came back.”
Shaw’s head goosenecked toward June. She nodded in the affirmative, confirming Bell’s claim: “Yes, I told Travis we could talk about the car.”
Temperature rising, but controlled, Shaw barked direction: “That Dodge is buried with trees all around it. See what you can do. We’re going to church.”
Bell and company got to work, tackling Lee 1 from the opposite approach, paying no mind to incoming rain. They cut small trees, set 4x4 railroad ties, pulled Lee 1 from its grave, and loaded a legend.
Tie-downs fastened, up the drive came the Astro, arguably rolling at a clip not recommended for a minivan on gravel. Fifteen minutes later, strapped in overalls, Shaw walked down the driveway, countenance markedly softened, and apologized for his anger.
“Travis, come watch the NASCAR race with me and let’s talk about the car.”
Under an enclosed patio attached to the house, on a box television, V8s roared around an oval as Bell sat atop a picnic table. Shaw was ready to deal.
“What’s it worth to you, Travis? I know you brought money.”
“I don’t even know where to start, Mr. Shaw.”
“OK then, here’s what we’ll do. I’m gonna get a pen out of my pocket and write a number on my palm. You do the same. We’ll start negotiations in the middle after we turn our hands over.”
Shaw was ready, instantly pulling a pen and marking on his hand. He handed the pen to Bell, who repeated the process.
The two men flipped their hands in unison, palms outward. Shaw showed $500; Bell showed $300. Shaw sold Lee 1 to Bell for $400.
“I bought the sunuvabitch for $400,” Bell recalls. “And I thought I was a shrewd negotiator. No, not at all. The last thing Cliff needed was my money. Looking back, I know he sold it for $400 because Cliff wanted me to have it as the next caretaker. He could have demanded thousands or he could have told me to take it off the trailer and put it back. That’s what a fine gentleman he was.”
As Bell reeled in disbelief, Shaw dropped a double-sweetener. “Hey, you want the two police cars over the hill? Same price? All three for $1,200?”
Deal of a lifetime. Down the gravel incline and back onto Lumpkin Campground Road, loaded with a king’s ransom.
No sleep till Indy.
Mona Lisa Beckons
Fans descended like carrion crows. A chip of paint, flake of rust, or piece of foam—the public tried to devour Lee 1.
“I’d take General Lee to shows or conventions, but it was a total hand-magnet,” Bell describes. “At the time, pre-restoration, it was all lead paint and sharp, rusted angles. Frankly, it was hard to babysit. I decided it was more than I could handle, and I sold it to four Ohio buyers for $20,000, splitting the money with the friends who helped me haul it from Dawsonville.”
Lee 1 had other plans. Lee 1 refused to let go of its Indianapolis caretaker.
In 2005, a renowned Florida collector, Marvin Murphy, called Bell, putting out a feeler for the acquisition of a genuine General Lee. Almost at the same time, the Ohio collectors called Bell, seeking to sell Lee 1 for the same $20,000—plus the trailer it sat on.
Bell arranged the deal. Murphy flew into Indianapolis from Florida and drove with Bell in an Expedition to pick up Lee 1 in Ohio. They nabbed Lee 1 and drove back to the Indianapolis airport. As Murphy exited the vehicle, intent catching a flight home, Bell hollered at Murphy: “What do you want me to do with Lee 1?”
“You’re going to restore it. You know all the right people. You know what needs to be done. You’re going to bring it to life.”
“Marvin, I’m a disc jockey. I’m a collector.”
Murphy stopped and leaned in the passenger window. “Travis, if someone spraypainted all over the Mona Lisa, someone would have to fix it. You’re that guy.”
Flak Attack
Sixteen tortured months later, under Bell’s painstaking direction, Lee 1 was returned to pristine form—the same Charger that made the 82’ jump on Nov. 11, 1978.
“This was all before AMD and aftermarket parts,” Bell recounts. “We went back with all 1969 sheet metal except for the trunk floor. We repainted correctly—gold first and orange after, TNT Express color. The original decals on the doors were vintage vinyl, and we put the 01 on crooked, and put a checkered flag and Confederate flag under the back window on the Dutchman panel. A famous pinstriper, Bob Kearney, painted the Confederate flag on the roof. It even got its famous cracked windshield back. Crazy awesome.”
“John Schneider, Tom Wopat, and Catherine Bach may not look exactly like they did in 1978, but Lee 1 looks just the same,” he adds. “It’s the spirit of the show.
Murphy kept Lee 1 for several years and then put it on the auction block at Barrett-Jackson in 2012. Lee 1 sold for roughly $110,000 to PGA golfer Bubba Watson, two-time winner of the Master’s.
In 2020, in the wake of political howls and sponsor dissatisfaction, Watson announced the upcoming removal of the Confederate flag from Lee 1.
“Bubba never took the flag off Lee 1, but everything went nuts,” Bell says. “People look at the world through a toilet paper tube. CNN was calling me, asking for comments about Dukes and the flag. Today, there’s not a channel on television showing Dukes. They were just a family who prayed before meals and wanted to help others. Now, they’re considered so evil they must be banned. Meanwhile, every kind of filth is allowed on TV and promoted. Just my opinion, but that’s how far we’ve gotten off track.”
From every direction, Bell paid a price in pressure for his General Lee association. Many Dukes fans, insistent on leaving Lee 1 in as-found condition, lambasted Bell for the restoration. The politically correct, outraged over the Confederate flag, pilloried Bell as a bigot.
“What insanity,” he says. “Things got so rough that Bubba couldn’t enjoy Lee 1 anymore. Just too much flak. He sold it to a private collector from Texas, where it’s kept today at the perfect home—and looks just like it did in episode 1. The story ends well.”
To the Grave
Whether Knight Rider’s customized Trans-Am, Magnum P.I.’s Ferrari, Jim Rockford’s Pontiac Firebird Esprit, Starsky & Hutch’s Gran Torino, or the A-Team’s GMC Vandura, none carry the aura of General Lee. And none possess a lost-and-found saga colored by the inimitable Bell.
Twenty-five years past finding, rescuing, and restoring the most influential car in pop history, Bell holds tight to the memories of his interactions with Schisler and Shaw in the back of beyond.
“I’d like to think I played a part in sharing Lee 1 with everyone, and that never would have happened without the help of Don and Cliff. Both showed me kindness when they had nothing to gain. Both men had character.”
Indeed. Takes one to know one.
Bell will carry the lesson to the grave. “It’s not complicated: On my tombstone, I don’t care about accolades, but I want my life to measure up to a simple inscription: Here lies Travis Bell. He helped people.”
Respect to Bell, forever the caretaker of Lee 1, the magical car that forever rules America’s rural roads.
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
How the Deep State Tried, and Failed, to Crush an American Farmer
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic
Ghost Cattle: $650M Ponzi Rocks Livestock Industry, Money Still Missing
Game of Horns: Iowa Poacher’s Antler Addiction Leads to Historic Bust
