Cooter Went From the Dukes of Hazards to the US House of Representatives
Ben Jones (1941 – ) became famous as Cooter, the good ‘ol boy mechanic from The Dukes of Hazard, when that television series first aired in the 1970s. The role of the dirty, crazy, greasy TV wrench monkey was a perfect fit for his real-life persona of a high-strung live wire. When the show was over, he left acting for other career opportunities, and turned to politics.
The son of a railroad section chief, Jones grew up in a shantytown near Portsmouth, Virginia. A hard partier and frequent drunk who liked chasing Four Roses whiskey with Miller High Life, he spent many a night in local lockups, usually for drunkenness and disturbing the peace. As he put it, he spent decades as a “likker drinkin’, hell raisin’, dope smokin’, fist-fightin’, womanizin’ jailbird wild man“. Car wrecks, arrests, and three failed marriages failed to wean him off the bottle until 1977, when he went on a five-week bender. When he finally came to, he checked into a detox clinic, and quit cold turkey. He avers that he has not had a drop of alcohol since 1977.
He had gone to the University of North Carolina for four years, where he caught the acting bug after performing in his first student play. He first met Gy Waldron, creator and director of the Dukes of Hazard, in 1975 while auditioning for a role in the movie Moonrunners, about a southern family that runs bootleg liquor. Waldron met with Jones after the movie’s release, and when it was reworked four years later into The Dukes of Hazard, Jones was the first person to audition. The new action comedy TV series’ defied critics’ predictions that it would flop, and flop miserably at that. Instead, it went on to become a worldwide success, and a cultural icon of the 1970s and 1980s. As the hit series soared, Jones’ character, Cooter, became a heartland hero.
After the show was finally canceled, Ben Jones left Cooter behind, and turned to politics, running for Congress as a Democrat from a Georgia district. Predictably, his opponents made an issue of his rough past rendering him unsuitable for public office. In an effective bit of campaign judo, he simply responded: “I awoke naked in a tattoo parlor in Talladega, Alabama. I knew it was time to change my lifestyle. So I went into politics “. After losing his first Congressional bid in 1986, he ran for a US House Representatives seat in 1988, won, and served two terms in Congress.
His political career was marked by candor and wit, but in 1992, his congressional district disappeared in a reshuffle following the 1990 census, and he lost the subsequent Democrat primary. In 1994, he ran against Newt Gingrich, lost, and left politics. He attempted a comeback in 2002, running for a House of Representatives seat in Virginia, but lost. Since the 1990s, he has run museums across the country dedicated to The Dukes of Hazard, known as “Cooter Museums”.
