East of Atlanta along the I-20 is the city of Covington, Georgia. Founded in 1822, it's home to just under 12,000 people and full of historic antebellum and Victorian homes. But what makes this city special to many fans is that the first five episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard TV series were filmed here in late 1978 and early 1979.
Only devoted Dukes fans know about the show's connection to Covington, and there is no one more devoted than Travis Bell. Bell, an Indianapolis disc jockey, is so committed that knowing wasn't enough for him. He had to see an orange '69 Dodge Charger jump a "Hazzard County" Sheriff's car in Covington. It took him two years and $27,000 out of his not-deep pockets, but in Covington on June 29th, 2003, a General Lee Charger driven by a stuntman who worked on the original show jumped over the same '74 Dodge Monaco squad car that the first of more than 300 General Lees jumped in its very first jump in front of Seney Hall on the campus of Oxford College on November 11th, 1978.
Dukes fans are a hearty lot. Beyond the normal fan club, there's a completely separate club just for the General Lee Chargers and the stunt team who flew them. The North American General Lee Fan Club, run by Bell and his co-president Gary Schneider of Chicago, maintains a Web site (www.generalleefanclub.com) that exhaustively documents almost all there is to know about the vehicles used during production of the TV series and the fan-created reproductions. It's more than a bit obsessive.
In 2001 Bell called up stuntman Corey Eubanks and invited him to a Dukes of Hazzard reunion. Eubanks, son of The Newlywed Game host and Rose Parade yack-meister Bob Eubanks, had started his stunting career on Dukes back in 1981 through a connection of his father's with the show's executive producer, Paul Picard. "I was 18 years old and knew nothing about stunts. The other stunt guys spent the first year trying to get me to quit and gave me the all risky/no-talent stunts." Eubanks stayed four years on Dukes until the series ended and he went on to establish himself as one of Hollywood's top stunt drivers with credits that include 2 Fast 2 Furious and the upcoming big-screen version of Starsky & Hutch.
The 2001 Dukes Fest was held in Sperryville, Virginia, at Cooter's Place, a store run by Ben Jones, the former Congressman who played the mechanic on the show. It was there Eubanks casually suggested that for the next convention, they ought to jump a General Lee. "I told him it was a great idea," says Bell. "Especially with the 25th anniversary of the show coming up." All that was left for him to do was come up with a suitably prepared car, a ramp, a place to jump, an insurance policy to cover it, and permission from the town of Covington.
"By the time of Dukes Fest 2002, I still hadn't found a car that would be our sacrificial lamb," Bell says, "but through the event we were able to make some connections. Bobby and Jamie Smith from Washington donated the car, a completely derelict '68 Charger. It had a decent frame and nothing else. They also lent us a '70 steel-crank 440 and a 727 automatic, cosmetically converted the car to a '69, troweled on 311/42 gallons of Bondo, and painted it orange. There was no interior, no side glass, and the grille was held together with zip ties, but it looked good from 10 feet."
From there the car went to Bell in Indianapolis and he worked on getting the suspension into shape, bolted on the correct American Racing Vector wheels (try to find those) and a reproduction of the original "Hazzard County" license plate (the General Lee Fan Club makes them), and applied the spot-on reproduction graphics and attached a reproduction front pushbar donated by Tom Warenzak's www.buildagenerallee.com. Yeah, that's right, there's a business out there that makes decals and pushbars to turn a Charger into a General Lee. "We built the car for less than $2,000 and even got a correct CB antenna," Bell says. "The only thing it didn't have was the ["Dixie"] horn."
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