John Wayne Birthplace & Museum

10/15/2026

Mervyn LeRoy is not a name that immediately evokes visions of John Wayne films. Although he is an acclaimed director and producer, he doesn't share the same history with Duke that people like Howard Hawks and John Ford do. There are only a few years when John Wayne released only one film. It seems like two was typically his minimum. One of those years that Duke released a single movie was 1946 with Without Reservations, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, born October 15, 1900, in San Francisco to a wealthy family.

In 1914, LeRoy entered show business as a Charlie Chaplin impersonator. Over the next twenty years, LeRoy moved from acting on stage to acting in the film business and finally moving behind the camera, hand-tinting film and occasionally returning to acting, including a bit part in Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 epic The Ten Commandments. Eventually, LeRoy moved to directing and made classics such as Little Caesar and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. In 1939, he produced The Wizard of Oz.

LeRoy returned to directing, and in 1946 his first collaboration with John Wayne was released: the comedy Without Reservations, co-starring Claudette Colbert and featuring music by Roy Webb, who was a composer on The Fighting Seabees. John Wayne stars as a Marine travelling cross-country who, unknowingly, falls for a celebrity writer and commences to criticize her best-selling book. Without Reservations was a hit for RKO. John Wayne went on to become the biggest film star in the world, and Mervyn LeRoy kept directing, including the Academy Award-nominated Quo Vadis (1951), and he won the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award in 1976.

Mervyn LeRoy had one more opportunity to work with John Wayne in 1968, when he was brought on to assist Duke in directing The Green Berets. He worked on the film for five and a half months but wouldn’t allow his name to be added to the credits, admitting that it was Duke’s vision, and he was just there to help an old friend. LeRoy retired after the film wrapped, and The Green Berets was his final directing job.

Although their paths only crossed twice, Mervyn LeRoy holds an important place in the John Wayne universe.

10/14/2026

John Wayne. Legend. Hero. American.

10/13/2026

10/10/2026

John Wayne spent a lot of his career hunting for something: cattle, gold, bandits, his own grandson. But maybe the greatest heist in John Wayne history is the search for his own footprints.

On October 1, 1955, Blood Alley opened in theaters around the country. Duke played a ship's captain caught up in the struggle for freedom in the Pacific. Just after its opening, on October 3, two women approached Grauman’s Chinese Theater and noticed that Duke’s footprints were loose and decided to take them home as a souvenir. In the process, the two thieves, Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz not only break the prints, but they are observed committing the crime and described as a "dishwater blonde" and a "frowsy redhead."

On October 10, in episode 2 of season 5 of I Love Lucy, Lucy comes face to face with her hero John Wayne. In an unusual two-part episode, “Lucy Visits Grauman’s” and “Lucy and John Wayne,” Lucille Ball has to try and trick Duke into making a new pair of footprints to avoid jail for herself and scandal for Ricky.

As has been said over and over on this page, John Wayne never got the chance to do enough comedy, and this episode is another example. The scene between Duke and the inimitable Lucy are TV gold. This episode is also another example of John Wayne’s business acumen, since you can see a Blood Alley poster in his hotel room, free advertising and a chance to trade lines with the queen of TV comedy.

When Duke finally comes face to face with Lucy, she realizes she has curlers in her hair and fixes the situation by putting her purse on her head, to which Duke responds, “Does she always wear a pocketbook on her head? I’m afraid I owe Bill Holden an apology.” In the course of the scene, Lucy mentions his new movie, Blood Alley and The High and the Mighty: “When you were up in that plane in The High and the Mighty when your motor conked out, my motor conked out.”

Like most entertainment from the golden age of film and television, the episode holds up brilliantly. Today is a good day to return and check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntgD4-zK0GQ

10/08/2026

1942 was a busy year for John Wayne. Duke released seven movies over the course of twelve months. Only two were war movies: Reunion in France with Joan Crawford and one of the defining movies of his career, Flying Tigers. Production of the film started soon after the US entered WWII. Republic Pictures brought on Kenneth Gamet (Pittsburg, Flying leathernecks and a bunch of Nancy Drew movies) to write the script. With John Wayne attached to star, the film was a guaranteed hit. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the American public was eager for films that could raise the spirits of a nation on a war footing.

The most difficult, and essential, part of Flying Tigers was going to be the depiction of aerial combat, a staple of action movies since the earliest days of cinema. As the nation was at war, the use of military aircraft was not an option. Republic Pictures came up with some novel ideas to complete the sequences. Some combat was filmed with miniatures created by Howard and Ted Lydecker, the special effects wizards at Republic Pictures. Their combat sequences were so good that they were nominated for an Academy Award, but lost to another John Wayne film, Reap the Wild Wind.

Aside from miniatures, the production approached Curtiss-Wright about using some planes waiting to be delivered to the military. The planes were repainted with the iconic Flying Tigers grinning teeth, and the company test pilot stood in for John Wayne. Other combat sequences used real footage taken from captured Japanese propaganda films.

When the film was released October 8, 1942, it was a hit and became the first Republic feature to make more than one million dollars.

It would be another year before Duke made another war picture. In 1943, he only made two films, and neither took him into battle. In 1944, Duke began a string of films honoring the heroism of the American military in WWII that would last more than a decade. In 1944, he made The Fighting Seabees, and in 1945, They Were Expendable and Back to Bataan.

10/07/2026

Becoming “The Duke”!

Learn more about John Wayne’s incredible life and legacy right here at his birthplace in Winterset, Iowa! We can’t wait for you to visit the John Wayne Birthplace and Museum!

10/05/2026

October 4 - 10 is the 2026 Banned Books Week. While John Wayne never made a movie based on a banned book, one of his movies was met with a temporary ban, not for drinking, smoking, or even violence, but for national security reasons.

On November 10, 1939, John Wayne made Allegheny Uprisingset in the southwestern Pennsylvania region in the 1760s. James Smith (John Wayne) plays an explorer struggling with British officials and Native American raiders.

Its release in the UK came in the midst of the Battle of Britain, and the nation's censors felt that the negative portrayal of the British military in Colonial America was a detriment to the war effort. By all reports, British opinions changed when America entered the war after the Bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Allegheny Uprising wasn't the only American film banned by the UK censors. John Ford's "Drums Along the Mohawk" was also banned for a time for the same reason.

These are not the only two films to ever be banned, but the only time Duke stepped in front of the censors.

10/04/2026

October is National Book Month, and it’s time to expand your John Wayne book collection.

Books about John Wayne have been a staple on bookstore shelves almost since Duke appeared in his first frame of film. Biographies, film novelizations, fan letters, even comic books featuring his famous characters have been around for decades. We have even featured some of the great writers who have chronicled Duke’s life and career here at the John Wayne Birthplace and Museum. You can always count on at least one being at our annual John Wayne Birthday Celebration in May of each year, right here in Winterset, Iowa.

One type of John Wayne book that we don’t see enough of is books aimed at little kids, ones extolling the virtues of Duke and his characters. Well, a few years ago the folks at Arcadia Publishing published a series of books aimed at passing on the wisdom of Duke to a new generation. In 1973, John Wayne released his Grammy-nominated album, America, Why I Love Her, with words by John Mitchum, the son of Duke’s friend, Robert Mitchum. With selections such as “Face the Flag”, “An American Boy Grows Up”, and “Why Are You Marching, Son”, the album is full of lessons for any kid. Arcadia set those words to drawings enticing to any child.

October is National Book Month and a perfect time to see John Mitchum’s words set to drawings designed to inspire a whole new generation of patriotic Americans. There are three volumes of “The Little Duke” Series. “American, Why I Love Her”, “An American Boy Grows Up”, and “The People” all take straight from the work of John Wayne and John Mitchum and are illustrated by Alina Welch. They deserve a place next to the hundreds of books that have been published about John Wayne in the last more than half a century.

It is Duke for a whole new generation. Happy National Book Month.

09/29/2026

The sun is shining here in Winterset, Iowa! What a beautiful morning to visit the birthplace of our hometown hero John Wayne!

09/28/2026

John Wayne battles smugglers to end their trade in illegal seal skins. That may not sound like the classic John Wayne plot, but the early years saw Duke playing all kids of parts. On September 28, 1936, Sea Spoilers was released, and John Wayne was a friend of the seals. Written by a team of scribes including George Waggner, who would later write both Operation Pacific and The Fighting Kentuckian, and directed by Frank R. Strayer, better known for directing a lifetime of Blondie moves, Sea Spoilers was sold as HE-MAN DYNAMITE in a RED-BLOODED STORY of the COAST GUARD.

John Wayne is a Coast Guard commander who tussles with seal skin smugglers who have kidnapped his girlfriend to protect their evil schemes. Nan Grey played Duke’s kidnapped girlfriend. Grey is probably better known for her work in the Universal Monsters films Dracula's Daughter (1936) and The Invisible Man Returns (1940). Like a lot of Duke’s early work, the entire Sea Spoilers is available on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erKbA01A2Xs