The Thrill of the Hunt for the ’69 Charger
Fast-forward to April 1st, 2017. The family is now almost grown-up. I received a text from my two boys, who were down at the World of Wheels expo in MA, with a picture and a caption that read, “Dad, do you know who this guy is?” It was a picture of the two of them with Ben Jones, “Crazy Cooter” from the hit TV show, The Dukes of Hazard. Ben was one of my favorite actors on the show when I was a kid. I replied back, “Do I know this guy? Heck ya! I know who he is and I am so jealous!”.
That day relit the candle of building my dream car, “General Lee”. The next night over dinner, the whole topic of discussion revolved around The Dukes, and its infamous ’69 Charger. The search was on once again. Later that night while having this discussion, I did one of my normal Craigslist searches, which I had been doing for years. One unbelievably botched listing came up: “69 Dodge Charger, converted to 68 Dodge Charger”. It was mislisted, misspelled, is-everything! The ad further read: “69 Automatic 383 Big Block car with fender tag confirming all this, asking $14,000.00.” I immediately replied to it and received an additionally botched reply as follows: “Yes, I still have the charger it has a lot of work done to it.” That was the end of his reply.
Mind you, this was a Thursday evening. I sent multiple messages all day on Friday, receiving no responses until 9:00 p.m. Friday night. He sent a short blurb followed by 10 pics of the car showing “the work”. It just so happened that this thing had a rotisserie restoration that had been done in 2002. Though the car had been converted to a “68 Clone”, it had a massive amount of work that had been done to it. It would make a perfect candidate for a General Lee conversion. I replied back saying, “I will be there at the crack of dawn Sunday morning.”
