John Wayne’s Son Debuts Exhibit At The Fort Worth Stockyards

Above, this display includes John Wayne's eyepatch from True Grit (1969). Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Back last January, Mitch Geriminsky and I took a trip to Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas to see some of the attractions there, such as the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Southfork Ranch, the Fort Worth Stockyards, Billy Bob's Texas and the John Wayne: An American Experience. I was in the area once before. It was when I was a part of the 1984 California Reagan Delegation to the Republican National Convention.

It was the Wayne exhibit that spurred me to want to go there this year.

CultureMap Fort Worth posted an article on the John Wayne: An American Experience. Along with details of the exhibit, he article also tells about how the exhibit came to be.

Here's some snippets:

[Ethan] Wayne says he never realized how much memorabilia his father had amassed until he accessed the collection after his oldest half-brother, who previously ran the family business, died in 2003.

“I thought, ‘My gosh, we have a lot of really significant memorabilia here,” he says. “I don’t think the rest of the family really knew. From that moment we started thinking about how we were going to find a home for it.”

An idea sparked when Wayne met Craig Cavileer, executive vice president of Majestic Realty Co. (which developed the Stockyards' Mule Alley complex and Hotel Drover) at the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas two years ago. Ethan had set up a pop-up museum there with a small sampling of his father’s memorabilia — just to gauge interest, he says. 

Cavileer convinced Wayne to visit Fort Worth and consider the Stockyards as a permanent home for the John Wayne Experience. It wouldn't be the Wayne family's first connection to Fort Worth. Ethan Wayne's mother Pilar, the widow of John Wayne, owned a café called Pilar’s on Bryan Irvin Road back in 2006.

"Now that the Stockyards redevelopment is happening and coming to life, we’re really happy because it’s the perfect spot for John Wayne,” he says. 

 To read more, go here.