Dixie horn, big-block soundtrack, and two always happy go lucky Southern boys who never really did anything wrong flinging their bright orange Dodge Charger around the dirt roads of Hazzard County while doing just enough to annoy the hell out of the local authorities, but never getting into enough trouble that jailing them seemed right. The Dukes of Hazzard brought Chargers into living rooms through the hijinks of Bo and Luke (and later, Vance and Coy) and galvanized the Charger’s place as screen royalty. Watching the show was much like watching …um…other kinds of movies: if you were here for the plot, you weren’t here for the right reasons. Watching the Dukes of Hazzard meant that you were about seeing a B-body being drifted, raced and most importantly, jumped.

Now, it’s a known fact that a few hundred Chargers met their demise at the hands of Warner Bros. during the show’s 1979-1985 run, and it’s known that a very minuscule amount of cars live to this day. LEE 1, the very first General Lee Charger and the most unique out of all of the cars used, is probably the most famous because of it’s restoration upon being located in a junkyard in 2000. The trunk floor was sagged from all of the concrete ballast used to keep the car level in flight, the body was beyond shot, but next to the VIN number was a sticker from a labelmaker that identified the car as the first of the original three cars that were built and used during the show’s time filming in the Conyers, Georgia area.

Now, twenty years after discovery, we know that LEE 1 went through a very controversial restoration, we know it sold at auction to golfer Bubba Wallace, and we know that in 2015 he made the extremely controversial decision to replace the Confederate battle flag on the roof with the United States flag after the Charleston, South Carolina church shooting. Here’s the story of how LEE 1 managed to go from a battered and bashed old Dodge in the trees back to it’s rock star heritage and then some by one of the guys who tracked the car down in the first place!