John Wayne: The Life and Legend Read Online Free PDF Page B

broke them. They never made that adjustment where they could get together again.”
    Clyde Morrison finally agreed that he wasn’t cut out for agriculture and the family moved to Glendale, about ten miles from Los Angeles, at the juncture of the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys. Clyde got a job in a drugstore and began saving money to open his own place.
    A year after the Morrisons arrived, Forest Lawn cemetery opened in Glendale, whose population was about eight thousand. The town had five schools, five banks, fifteen churches, two newspapers, a City Hall at 613 Broadway, a couple of markets and general stores, and three drugstores. Fred Stofft, who would become a neighborhood pal of Marion’s in Glendale, remembered that “there was no industry there. All the men that lived there worked in Los Angeles. It was a very nice town, about a 20 minute ride into Los Angeles on the Red Car.”
    All of that would change, and soon, as the population and opportunities of Southern California exploded. (By 1930, Glendale’s population would be 62,736.) The Morrisons lived at 421 South Isabel, Clyde worked at the Glendale Pharmacy on West Broadway, and they joined the First Methodist Church. It was certainly an improvement over Palmdale.
    Young Marion was about nine years old when he picked up his lifelong nickname. Big Duke was the name of the family Airedale, a dog that Wayne always remembered as “very good. . . . He chased the fire engines and I chased Duke.”
    The Airedale’s name was no accident, for Duke was also the name of the great cowboy star Tom Mix’s large, indeterminate hound, as the boy would surely have known—Tom Mix was one of his favorite movie stars. Duke—Morrison’s Duke—would occasionally sleep at the fire station until his boy came back from school to pick him up. The firemen christened young Morrison “Little Duke,” which was gradually shortened to “Duke.”
    These would seem to have been hard years for the young boy, although there was a temporary financial respite when Clyde’s father died, leaving him a small inheritance. But that didn’t last long and Clyde resumed his habit of downward mobility. The family moved every year or two.
    “[Clyde] was lucky if he cleared $100 a month,” said his son. He remembered that the firemen gave him milk, telling him to take it home to his cat. But the Morrisons didn’t have a cat—the milk was really for Duke and his brother. He was also bullied by older, larger boys. One day he walked by the firehouse with a black eye, and one of the firemen started giving him lessons in self-defense.
    By 1917, the ten-year-old Duke Morrison was attending Intermediate School at Wilson and Kenwood and getting good grades. The family was living in a small house in the heart of downtown Glendale at 136 North Geneva, behind City Hall. Duke’s neighborhood hangouts included the Litchfield Lumberyard and Sawmill a block or two down the street on Geneva, Lund’s Blacksmith Shop on Wilson, and Malscher’s Livery Stables on North Glendale, where he occasionally went horseback riding.
    One neighbor was named McCalveny, who supplied some much needed raffish charm for the boy. Wayne remembered that Mr. McCalveny ran guns for Pancho Villa. “They went from rags to riches every other month,” said Wayne. “If they were eating beans, the gun-running business was bad, and if the neighbors were invited in, business was good.”
    From the time he was in the seventh grade, Duke had to supply his own spending money and clothes. A girl in the neighborhood remembered him as “quiet, withdrawn.” Delivering the
Los Angeles Examiner
put enough money in his pocket to pay for the movies that he loved.
    While young Morrison was not growing up in the heart of the movie business, he wasn’t exiled from it either. Glendale had a couple of working movie studios—Sierra Photoplays, which opened for business in 1917, and Kalem—or Astra—Studios, which opened in 1913 and was in