Thursday, June 11, 2009

The Duke

John Wayne died thirty years ago today. NRO has a great gathering of remembrances here.

He was born in Winterset, Iowa which is not too far from where Steve grew up. In 2007, when we went up to Iowa, Steve took me to John Wayne's house. It's a tiny thing, and is a museum now. Winterset is a lovely little town (pop. @5000) and is in Madison County which is where all the covered bridges are. We looked at lots of those, too!

We bought a couple of kitschy things in the museum (I bought The Teenager a John Wayne bookmark and Steve bought some John Wayne beef jerky.) They had all of his movies for sale in there, and all the usual things you'd expect. There was a cool chess set that The Teenager coveted for days, but $300 was more than I wanted to drop at The John Wayne Museum. They even had a couple of recliners placed in front of a television and you could sit down and watch John Wayne movies for a bit. And, as you can see, Steve and The Teenager had their picture made with The Duke, himself. Not really. But it looks good!

Anyway, here's a clip from Steve's favorite John Wayne movie, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. It's hard to pick a favorite, and he may have several favorites, but I know he likes this one.

It was made in 1949 and is one of the John Ford movies.

2 comments:

Steve said...

That was a fun trip. Who could forget the rolling of the eyes from the teenager and my son, when I gave one of my favorite John Wayne movie quotes from True Grit, "I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned. Or see you hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker's convenience. Which'll it be?"

The Vegas Art Guy said...

Rio Bravo is my favorite movie with The Shootist a close second.