This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories.

Born in Kentucky, James Best was orphaned at the age of three and eventually adopted.

After high school, he joined the United States Army Air Corps during World War II in July of

1944 and served with the military police in war-torn Germany. He founded the James Best Theater

Center in Los Angeles, becoming one of the hottest acting coaches in Hollywood,

training the likes of Clint Eastwood, Bert Reynolds, Glenn Campbell, Quentin Tarantino, and Regis Philbin.

Best and his wife actually gave the young Tarantino a place to sleep while he struggled to make it in Hollywood.

Just before landing his role as Rosco P. Coltrane on the Dukes of Hazard,

Best taught drama for two years at the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss,

right here where we broadcast in Oxford, Mississippi.

Here's James Best with his story.

Music Mississippi. Here's James Best with his story. After the war, there was what they call werewolf gangs in Feasbaden, Germany.

And they were teenagers that had actually been trained by the SS and actually a lot of them fought

in the war.

They would be like 12 year old.

They'd get on a bicycle with a bazook and fight the Russians with tanks.

So they were rough.

Well, we had to clean up the town being in my thing.

So I was getting shot at it 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. And a girl walked down the steps and she had a green uniform on with C-A-T on her shoulder. I said, come in the Hillbet, I said, come here, please. And she said, I'm begging point. I said, are you an American? And she said, yes. And I said,

what's going on? I said, what is the CAT? She said, a civilian actress technician. And I said,

...