I was a bit young for John Wayne. My dad loved his movies, but I did not see one until I was quite old. South Africa was also one of the last countries in the world to introduce television, so we never saw him on television either. The only picture I had of him in my head was as a grizzled veteran of the wild west.
I was flabbergasted to see a young John Wayne looking so fresh-faced (below). Turns out he started his career during the 1920s in the silent-movie era, and his last movie was 1977. South Africa started with two hours of television a day in 1976 and by the time we had enough hours of broadcasting a day to have reruns of movies, he was quite old. I had no idea he had been making westerns that long.
His tombstone reads
Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday
o what a wonderful tombstone quote; I gobbled up John Wayne movies when I was a kid in the fifties: a great time to be alive 🙂 enjoyed the photos too: how young he looked then 🙂 I saw him most memorably in the original ‘True Grit’ movie of ’69 —