book review

Confessions of Crazy Cooter

By Gary Tischler

MAY 2008

With Ben Jones, what you read is what you get.

Jones put a lot of stuff in the title of his book “Redneck Boy in the Promised Land” subtitled The Confessions of ‘Crazy Cooter’. The title sounds like a summing up, sort of, but really, it’s just the beginning. It’s the language and the telling in the book that tells the story, or at least gets you the essence, the core of the guy.  The language in the book is straight-forward, plain-spoken; it often has the feel of somebody speaking his mind at a gathering where speaking your mind is like a rude bodily noise.

If the book sometimes reads like one of those country songs by the likes of George Jones or Johnny Paycheck, with a dab of blues in it, the telling of it is right in your face, frank and honest, even unforgiving, often funny as a pretty short kind of joke that snaps your head back. Jones doesn’t varnish much.

The life of Ben Jones  could serve as a shining example of an up-from-nothing with no indoor toilet story, an exemplary story about making good in spite of yourself. It could also be the basis for a rap sheet. Or how the Lord and the love of a really good-and endlessly patient-woman can save your life. Or a testimonial at a revival meeting or a talking point at an AA meeting. And it’s all of those things. Put another way, plain spoken or not, Ben Jones is, well, complicated.

“Yup, I think I pretty much did it all,” Jones said in a recent interview in Georgetown accompanied by his wife, Alma Viator, the affectionately remembered public relations pro who really knew how to open a road show at the National Theater, among many accomplishments. He wasn’t being kind to himself when he said that. He was recalling just about the worst day or night of his life, when “I nearly died from drinking.”

“I was thirty-six old and I was dying from all the drinking,” he said. “From acute alcoholic poisoning. I absolutely was dying, sure as anything.”

Jones had been drinking all of his life then, since his teenage years growing up by the railroad tracks in North Carolina, and he had his daddy as an example.

His summation of that 36-year-old’s low point goes like this: “There had been three disastrous marriages, and countless fractured relationships. I had been jailed for drinking in public, drunk and disorderly, public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, assaulting an officer, criminal trespass, battery, resisting arrest and ‘failure to move on’.”

“Failure to move on” might be the one charge that didn’t stick. “I prayed,” he said of that time and “I gave myself over to the Lord.”

He says this in such a matter of fact way that you know its true and that you don’t really have to ask any questions about it.

But the word miracle does come to mind when you consider what happened after that night on September 26, 1977.

He started getting regular work, on television, smallish films, and finally, he got an audition for a job playing a guy named Cooter, a good old boy and mechanic in a show that would end up being “The Dukes of Hazzard” that starting in 1979 would become a top-rated show for CBS  running right through a chunk of the disco 1980s. Jones was part of a memorable and large cast, which featured the good looking guys, Bo and Luke Duke and their cousin Daisy, and Boss Hogg, and Uncle Jesse and  of course, a guy named Cooter played by none other than one Ben Jones.

“Let me tell you something, that show is as popular as ever,” Jones said. “They watch it in Japan and China and Europe. I get fan mail. Our show was family fare, the people in it were people folks out there could identify with.”

But Cooter, like Jones, was a straight shooter.  Which ought not to serve you in good stead as a politician, “They got me to run in Georgia, against an incumbent Republican. Nobody thought I could win. I didn’t think I could win. Namely, they figured the name recognition, people knew me. So I ran.”  He lost, but more importantly, he almost won. And the next time he ran against the same Republican congressman, he won. Which is how he found himself beneath the Capitol Dome, raising his hand and being sworn in as a United States Congressman from Atlanta on January 29, 1989.

“I swear to God I soaked up everything I could. I was like a sponge on the learning curve,” Jones said. He served two terms before re-districting cut him out of his seat and resulted him having a notion to take on Gingrich in his seat, which didn’t work out.

Jones is a Democrat, but hardly typical. He’s a big supporter of Barack Obama, and not a fan of the Clintons. “Race in the south is different than anywhere else,” he said. “I grew up in the kind of place where you interacted all the time, we all knew each other.”

He still acts. He led the “Hazzard” revival by opening up a country store kind of museum called “Cooter’s Place”. He and Viator took up residence in Rappahannock County in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.  “Cooter’s Place” soon blossomed. Hazzard reunions and a yearly Dukefest ensued. He also ran for Congress again, unsuccessfully, getting swamped in the GOP high tide.

He’s obviously a long way and time and a lot of precious love from that night he almost died flat out. You’d almost have to say he’s contented, except of course, he’s always looking for more things to do and discover. Like doing a one man theater show on baseball legend Dizzie Dean, which he wrote.  Like writing a book.

That Crazy Cooter. Crazy like a fox.