Ben Jones, ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ Actor and Congressman, Dies at 84

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/10/obituaries/ben-jones-dead.html

He played the mechanic Cooter Davenport on the hit television series before serving two terms as a Democratic congressman from Georgia.

39 points · 6 comments · view on lemmy.world

6 Comments

ExtremeDullard@piefed.social · 9 pts · 2d (5 replies)

I met him briefly in the late 90s. He came across as a good, honest-to-goodness man.

RIP.

HeyJoe@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 1d (4 replies)

When i opened this I was expecting the worst and instead pleasantly surprised to not see how horrible of a person they were for once. Seems to be all I see whenever an older famous person dies anymore.

KC_Royalz@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1d (3 replies)

The actual duke boys turned out to be the IRL villains

nocturne@slrpnk.net · 1 pts · 1d (1 reply)

I thought it was Jon Schneider that was a villain, did Tom Wopat end up veering right too?

SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 1d

Wopat was a drunk driver, coke head, assaulted a woman on set. He got off with no real consequences.

His excuse for two big bags of cocaine was that he used it infrequently thus it lasted a long time, thus he was not a dealer. Judge bought it.

SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 1d

Uncle Jesse in real life invested heavy in oil projects and left an estate of over $5M.