4.3 • 737 Ratings
🗓️ 2 December 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
On this episode of Our American Stories, before he became Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard, James Best lived a life filled with hardship, discipline, and creativity. Orphaned at three, shaped by his service with the Military Police in wartime Germany, and later admired for his work as the gentle lawman with Flash, the show’s basset hound, he carried a depth that never reached the screen. He appeared years earlier on The Andy Griffith Show as Jim Lindsey, yet it was his later work guiding young actors in Hollywood that revealed the heart of a man who understood struggle, humor, and the art of performance.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.1 | And we continue with our American stories. |
| 0:18.2 | Born in Kentucky, James Best was orphaned at the age of three and eventually adopted. |
| 0:23.9 | After high school, he joined the United States Army Air Corps during World War II in July of |
| 0:28.8 | 1944 and served with the military police in war-torn Germany. He founded the James Best Theater |
| 0:35.3 | Center in Los Angeles, becoming one of the hottest acting coaches in Hollywood, |
| 0:40.0 | training the likes of Clint Eastwood, Bert Reynolds, Glenn Campbell, Quentin Tarantino, and Regis Philbin. |
| 0:46.4 | Best and his wife actually gave the young Tarantino a place to sleep while he struggled to make it in Hollywood. |
| 0:53.7 | Just before landing his role as Rosco P. Coltrane on the Dukes of Hazard, |
| 0:58.6 | Best taught drama for two years at the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss, right here |
| 1:04.5 | where we broadcast in Oxford, Mississippi. |
| 1:07.9 | Here's James Best with his story. |
| 1:17.8 | Music Mississippi. Here's James Best with his story. After the war, there was what they call |
| 1:19.5 | weirwolf gangs in Feast, Germany. And they were teenagers that had |
| 1:24.8 | actually been trained by the SS. And actually a lot of them fought in the war |
| 1:29.5 | they were like 12 year old they'd get on a bicycle with a bazook and fight the Russians with tanks |
| 1:34.1 | said they were rough well we had to clean up the town being in my thing so I was getting shot at |
| 1:39.5 | and more people did in the war you know and I was going up to get a cup of coffee and a donut at the PX. |
| 1:46.6 | And a girl walked down the steps and she had a green uniform on with C-A-T on her shoulder. |
| 1:53.1 | I said, come into a hip bit. I said, come here, please. And German, she said, I'm begging point. |
| 1:58.8 | I said, are you in America? And she said, yes. And I said, what's going on? I said, what is the C-A-T? She said, I'm begging point. I said, are you an American? And she said, yes. And I said, |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in 26 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from iHeartPodcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of iHeartPodcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.