I looked around and didn't see this anywhere. It was in today's Chicato Tribune.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/…0307apr23,1,4214947.story
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. -- Newport Beach will fete John Wayne, but it can't throw the bash at his house. The bayfront home was ripped down to make room for a larger estate.
The city has wiped away most of his other fingerprints. The tennis club Wayne built: renamed; the affiliated Dukes team is now called the Breakers. The Orange County airport remains the grizzled leading man's namesake -- although one county supervisor toyed with renaming it The O.C. Airport when the television soap outstripped the leading man in hipness.
As Newport Beach gears up to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Wayne's birth, a classically Southern California conundrum has emerged. Many places where "The Quiet Man" star snoozed and caroused in the seaside town have been sold, revamped, renamed or bulldozed.
"His remnants are in Pacific View" -- a hillside cemetery -- "and that's about it," said Bill Grundy, president of the Newport Beach Historical Society.
The city is honoring its Oscar-winning adopted son with one of Wayne's few tangible legacies: celluloid. The Newport Beach Film Festival, which began last week, will screen several movies, including "The Searchers" and "True Grit," and trot out family members and co-stars.
"What could be more fitting?" said James Olson, who co-authored the biography "John Wayne: American." "Who needs a monument to go visit? People don't even need to leave their homes to worship Wayne, when he's on cable."
The approach says plenty about Southern California's sense of history. Even Wayne's white colonial estate in Los Angeles, where he lived before moving to Newport Beach, could not dodge the wrecking ball. "Maybe there's not the same East Coast ethos, you know, 'Washington slept here,'
" said Pamela Lee Gray, author of a book about Newport Beach and a one-time architectural historian in Los Angeles County.
By contrast, residents in Wayne's birthplace of Winterset, Iowa, whose centennial extravaganza is next month, painstakingly restored the squat home where he was born Marion Morrison on May 26, 1907. As many as 40,000 people -- eight times the town's population -- stroll through annually, and there are plans for a museum larger than Wayne's Newport Beach home.
"That was so disappointing when his house was torn down -- to lose that to the winds of progress, I just don't know," said Wayne Davis, a John Wayne Birthplace Society board member. He lived in Newport Beach more than a decade, "and there's unfortunately not much to show for it."
Wayne's popularity today could make many a living actor jealous. In Harris polls that ask Americans to name their top leading man, the Duke has notched a Top 10 spot for more than a decade.
In Newport Beach, the relationship between the Duke and his fans was as tight as that of cowboy and horse. "They had an icon there," said Olson, a professor of history at Sam Houston State University in Texas. "The image he projected hearkened back to an era where black and white and good and evil were clear."
In 1965, Wayne and his family moved to Newport Beach after he was diagnosed with lung cancer. To the Duke, Orange County's coastline inspired nostalgia -- he had long bodysurfed the Wedge, injuring his shoulder badly enough to lose his University of Southern California football scholarship and switched to acting.
Newport Beach -- "the mecca for prosperous political conservatives" -- was also a flawless political match for a star fed up with Hollywood liberals, Olson said. In the century-old city, "he became John Wayne the person, not John Wayne the celluloid star," visitors bureau President Gary Sherwin said aboard the Wild Goose, Wayne's 136-foot minesweeper-turned-yacht, reincarnated as a charter vessel.
Wayne's Newport home stood until 2002, about 23 years after his death. The couple razing it invited a horseback-riding Wayne impersonator to its farewell soiree.
Hank Wiessner, whose company runs boat tours in Newport Harbor, said the owners asked that the home be deleted from the tour because it no longer resembles where the quintessential movie cowboy waved howdy to passing boats.
"I wish it was still there," Wiessner said. "All we can say is, 'That's where it was."
