It’s not a national holiday but, for some, it should be. On May 26, 1907 Marion Robert Morrison came into the world in Winterset, Iowa. When he left on June 11, 1979, he was John Wayne, an American icon. Men of a certain generation or two, fortunate to grow up going to the many movies he made in a long career owe him a great debt. By his very presence on the silver screen he taught us all what it meant to be a man. Wayne was masculine without having to prove it. He literally embodied the virtues we want in our heroes. As an actor he shared those attributes with the boys who grew up wishing to be like him and the women who no doubt found him attractive. Though he played many heroic characters, a Marine in World War Two, a Navy Commander, and later a Green Beret in Vietnam, it was his many roles as a cowboy that made us many of us yearn to ride a horse and learn to shoot a six-gun and a rifle.

---

Support Canada Free Press

---