She

took the most redeeming part of his name in that time. The Robert, yes.

Thank you for saying that. Yeah, yeah, you're welcome. It gives him Mitchell. What a shit name. You're never gonna be nothing but an M&M. Just a Marion Mitchell. Marion Mitchell. Marion Mitchell, get down here.

Marion Mitchell Morrison. That's what it stands for now robert you can come over here you don't got to do chores today yeah

that's more or less what goes on so molly morrison was famed for her frequent rages where again clyde's pretty retiring uh so as he grows up mary and comes to vastly prefer hanging out with his dad while his brother Robert becomes a mama's boy which suited mama just fine because she only likes her little boy so Winterset Iowa to this day has not really gotten over John Wayne but he gets over his hometown basically immediately right the family moves to Nebraska when he's like three or four and he later tells an interviewer just about all I remember about Winterset is riding horses playing football and the time i thought i discovered electricity and there's more to that quote but i'm not going to read it because it's funnier if i don't so marian's

we really need to know more about when he thought he discovered electricity it's

not as funny as just letting your imagination go he's

like when i actively tried to kill myself because my mom was driving me nuts yeah i mean essentially

yes and

i stood out in a storm yes

i mean you you have literally grasped it yes okay

okay i like it i like it and the interviewer was like no more questions found something out yeah it's

cute kid stuff right he's just a kid at this point so his early life is very unstable the family moves constantly they've moved like a bunch of times by the time he's seven or eight which is not super common for this period right you know i my early life we moved a bunch but like you had cars you know it wasn't hard right um so he's moving in a period of time where that's a real trauma. Clyde's bad with money. He declares bankruptcy. He loses his pharmacy. He's like moving around, taking up shit jobs. This pattern repeats itself a couple of times until in 1913, when Marian is six, the family moves to Des Moines with Molly's fit to live with Molly's family while Clyde tries to get back on his feet. So they're living in Des Moines. 1914 comes around. World War I kicks off, you know, over in Europastan. Yes.

Make more men. Make more men.

Oh, yeah. Well, that's going to have an impact on the story. But if initially the U.S. isn't involved in World War I, although guys like Teddy Roosevelt sure want us to be. And while this is all kind of building up, Clyde's father, you know, Marion's grandpa, buys a parcel of land in California and asks if his son wouldn't mind, like, working it. Like, hey, you guys want to, nothing else has worked, want to try farming in California? So Clyde has no experience doing this. He's not particularly apt for farm life, but he's like, sure, we'll give it a shot. So the family moves across the country to live with their grandparents and try to make it go with the farm. So here's the problem, Francesca. The place where Clyde Sr. purchases 80 acres is Palmdale, California. You ever been to Palmdale?

I don't think so, no. So

it is right next to the Mojave. gets about four inches of rain in a good year which is slightly more than portland got the day before i wrote this episode so wow most things do not grow well in palmdale if you are able to divert tremendous water resources from elsewhere in the state you can make a pretty good go of avocado farming there, right? Now, that was not really happening at this point, and it's not a good place for agriculture. And the specific thing they try to grow there initially is corn, which does not do well in a climate like this. No. Yeah.

Palmdale is where, I'm looking at it, all the poppies are. People, you know, influencers go and take photos of themselves on the poppies.

It's beautiful. It's a lovely part of the state. So does opium

grow there?

Yeah, I think you could grow opium there if you wanted to. Hell yeah. But, you know, it's not a great place to be a farmer unless you're being a very specific kind of farmer. And they decide to grow corn. And again, like, Ukraine is one of the countries in the world that grows the most corn. Think of the climate of Ukraine versus a town right on the edge of the Mojave, you know? So the Morrisons start trying to grow shit. And their whole plot is kind of a land scam. There was some rules with the government where if they could develop all 80 acres, the government would give them another 500 something acres. So it's they're trying to, like, game the government to make it rich. But they were going to have to be better at farming than they wind up being to do that. So the only house on the property is what John Wayne later called a glorified shack. It was unpowered, unheated, and it had no running water. Marion later recalled the terrain as barren, deserted country, but he and his dad set to work trying to make the desert bloom. So while they're struggling to farm, muscular Christianity in the United States is reaching its apex. When World War I kicks off, Teddy Roosevelt himself repeatedly urged the U.S. to get involved, right? Like we're just being a bunch of girls if we don't get involved in this war and feed our sons to machine guns. And Woodrow Wilson, who gets to be the president, campaigns on not doing that. He's like, seems like a bad idea, World War I. Maybe we should stay out of that. Obviously, he's not going to stick to his guns. So Teddy Roosevelt and him are kind of having this big public spat over whether or not the U.S. should get involved. And Teddy's not the only one really pushing the United States for involvement. There's a whole culture that grows up on the right wing, urging intervention in World War One. And I'm going to read another quote from Jesus and John Wayne here. Former professional baseball player Billy Sunday preached this new muscular Christianity with unrivaled zeal. Wanting nothing to do with a sissy, lily-livered piety, Sunday preferred to pack his old muzzle-loading gospel gun with Ipecac, buttermilk, rough-on rock salt, and whatever else came in handy and let it fly. In the spring of 1917, with America's entry into the First World War, Sunday's militancy went beyond metaphor. He had no time for pacifists or going draft dodgers, godforsaken mutts, or apparently for nuance of any kind. In these days, all are patriots or traitors to your country and the cause of Jesus Christ. An evangelist for war, Sunday was known to leap atop his pulpit, waving the American flag. Now, I that quote because this is a guy who's prominent in the U.S. right wing when John Wayne is a kid. Later on, our boy Marion is going to grow up to become this man. Essentially, this is what he does during Vietnam.

This is the problem when you conflate nation building with Jesus and religion. This is the problem when you, when you have like Christian settler colonialism is when you've stopped settling, when you've stopped killing one set of people, you are existentially like in a crossroads. You're bankrupt. You're like, I don't know who I am anymore. You don't have anything

to do if we're not killing people. Yeah. Right.

And then you think, and then you think that Jesus and your God just wants you to kill more people and that will then prove yourself. Yeah.

It's like, you know, you have these guys who like work their whole life at some sort of horrible financial industry job and they're able to retire, which a lot of people don't get to do anymore. But once they retire one of two things happens they either die immediately because they don't have anything to do or they get real into cryptocurrency um and we're in america's like cryptocurrency phase our first one right here right that that's what world war one is is like bored apes for for the united states sure it's another for us to chase those highs.

Yeah. It's like our midlife crisis. Yeah.

So, um, yeah, uh, our boy, Marion, um, at this point, he's a little kid with a girl's first name, which causes him a lot of problems. So he goes to a public school. Uh, there are no buses back then. So he has to ride a horse miles every day to and from class. And today this would make you the toughest son of a bitch in second grade. But this is rural California in 1914, so it's not an uncommon thing to be doing. But he does get mocked constantly because, again, his name is Marion. Other kids asked him why his mom didn't send him to school in skirts. Biographer Scott Eiman writes, Not surprisingly, in later years, he didn't particularly like to talk about his childhood. His last wife said that the stories came out only in fragments during their 20 years together. Mainly, he felt unloved by his mother and was quietly distressed by his father's ineffectuality. So, kind of a sympathetic kid at this point.

A little bit. Yeah. A little bit of a, you know, making of a mass shooter.

Yeah. You could see a few places this could go, right? Yes. So a lot of negative left-wing coverage of John Wayne will note his upbringing in suburban Glendale, which is where he winds up after this, and that he's like a surf bum as a young man. To kind of make the case that his cowboy mystique was all a lie, I don't really think that's fair. Because again, he does spend years on a farm in the middle of nowhere in a pretty rugged terrain, like riding a horse to and from school every day. One of his jobs on the farm is to stand in the field with a rifle looking for snakes while his dad works the field. Because like, if his dad gets bitten by a snake out in the middle of the desert, he going to die so this is actually like the source of a lot of trauma for john wayne because he's he's standing out there with a gun trying to shoot spot and shoot snakes in time to stop his dad from getting bitten and he just constantly has these fucking nightmares when he goes to sleep at night of like being too late and his dad getting bitten by a snake um that's a lot to put on like a seven year old kid his

mom would never let him live that one down but like i'm also imagining a kid who's also bored to tears standing there absolutely and then just imagining like you know you know hordes of indians on the plane you know just coming over the mountain and like just very in his imagination he

definitely is and he spends when he's like riding his horse to and from school and shit he spends a lot of time imagining cowboy fights and being attacked by bandits and shit which get very normal shit for a seven-year or whatever in this situation um and he he notes that like even though he has all these nightmares he he never talks about it like he's he's constantly dreaming about like thousands of snakes coming to attack him and his dad. But he doesn't feel like he can say anything. Like you're not allowed to talk about being afraid of things as a young man in this period. So he just kind of keeps it bottled up inside. Now, being a kid. Yeah, like I said, he's got all these different fantasies and stuff. And it seems like some of the happier moments in his childhood at this period are the time he spends on a horse kind of lost in fantasies, riding to and from and at least according to scott iman he loves this horse uh jenny is her name um and she's his she's his his his buddy out there but she's also got some sort of chronic stomach illness that makes it impossible for her to put on weight so no matter how well the mor feed her, she looks like she's starving. Now, if you know, California, Francesca, you know, it's full of people who are bad at minding their own damn business. And a neighbor calls the humane society to claim that Marion is abusing this horse.

Wow. That's like the next door of the early 1900s. Yes. Yeah. Just like,

it's always

been the same place. Skinny

This little kid in this little horse, I feel like he's not feeding it enough. Yup. Yeah. So Scott Eiman writes, Marion stoutly insisted he was always feeding his horse, that he carried oats for the horse even on their daily commute to and from school. His teacher and his parents stood up for him. The county vet examined the horse and diagnosed the wasting disease, but a sense of outrage over being falsely accused never left him. I learned you can't always judge a person or a situation by the way it appears on the surface, he remembered. You have to look deeply into things before you're in a position to make a proper decision.

So they tried to cancel him early.

They tried to cancel him. Cancel culture came for John Wayne. Because of his ragged-ass horse. Some

nosy lib like, that horse needs more food. Shut the fuck up.

And he does have his, he has his old yeller moment because this horse never gets better and they have to shoot it. Oh, God damn it. Yeah. You know, it's what happens. Did he have to shoot his own horse? That I do not know. Possibly. Although I kind of, I would, I think maybe dad would be the kind of dude to not put that on his kid. I don't really know. But his mom was like, nuh-uh,

uh-uh. He's shooting that horse. Marion, you're shooting your horse. You're shooting your best friend, Jenny. Yeah.

Shoot your best friend, Jenny, then we're eating her because we're poor as shit. So despite trying very hard, Clyde and Marion are terrible at farming um and the 118 degree summers very quickly force Clyde's ailing parents to flee for the cooler climates of Los Angeles when they leave they tell their son like hey we made a bad call with this farm you guys should probably get the fuck out of here too right like doesn't seem like Palmdale's going anywhere good maybe move to LA it's it seems like it'll always be affordable and a good place to live. Yeah, it's nothing but citrus

trees at this point.

Nothing but citrus trees at this point. Yeah, there's like 40 people there. So Clyde tries for a little while more to farm this plot of land. But when the horse dies, Marion has to walk or hitchhike like an eight mile round trip to school every day um it's just a brutal way for a kid to live like he's got to get up hours before he starts this hike to do his chores uh because you know it's a farm um but he's also he does really well in school still he's a good student and he distracts himself from the realities of his life by obsessively reading and rereading catalogs particularly sears catalogs and just like underlining all the things he's going to buy one day when he somehow gets money. Classic poor kid shit. Pretty normal behavior. So after about two years, his parents can barely stand to be in the same room as each other. Farming kind of destroys the marriage, and they have no money. All of their crops keep getting eaten by jackrabbits so like a lot of our damn it

meanwhile what's robert doing robert's just like sitting there and like he's fucking useless piece of

shit robert morrison motherfucker yeah maybe we should call him john lame um so uh they decide farming's not gonna work and like a whole bunch of armen are going to do a few years from this point. The Morrisons leave home, and they move to Glendale, California. Hey,

that's New Riley. Welcome. Yeah, I like Glendale. We got the Brand Mall over there. You

have the Pete's Coffee that sells what in every other city is the tantalizing Turkish coffee blend. But in Glendale, they call it something else without the word. I think that's just the tantalizing blend because you don't want to have Turkish in the name of a coffee that you're selling in Little Armenia. Not really a good call. It's not Little Armenia. This is big Armenia out here. It is verging on the size of regular Armenia now. It's a big, big place. I love Glendale, actually. It's very pretty, very nice town. And today it is like a sizable, like it's not a small city. I mean, obviously, like all of Los Angeles is a bunch of separate cities, but also kind of one big ass city. That's not really the case when the Morrisons move to Glendale. It is kind of like its separate little town on the outskirts of Los Angeles. I think it's like 8,000 people, which is way... It's kind of like octuple in population in a couple of years after they move there. It blows up big time, right? But at this point, it's kind of a sleepy suburb. So Marion is nine when they move to the Los Angeles burbs. And, you know, at this point, he has finally made it more or less to the city that's going to make him famous. So they move in, they get used to LA life, they get a dog, an Airedale, they name Big Duke. The name of this dog is borrowed from the movie dog of a fake cowboy named Tom Mix, who is like one of the most popular cowboys of the day. We'll be talking about in a bit. And Marion, he's like Marion's idol. So like, you know, obviously, as a little kid in this period, he's watching cowboy movies every chance he gets. And Tom Mix is the big cowboy.