John Wayne may have hung up his Stetson 30 years ago and gone to that big corral in the sky, but at least in one state of the Union he still casts a big shadow. You can’t go far in Utah, the place ‘the Duke’ starred in five of the finest Westerns in the genre’s history, without bumping into someone who worked with the film legend, stabled his horses or just ran errands for him.
‘When he walked on set everyone knew it,’ remembers Bob Musselman. ‘He was moody, sure, but he still had a good sense of humour.’
Musselman, now nearing 70 years of age, grew up around Moab, the southern Utah desert town intimately linked with John Wayne and his Western films. His father, Rusty Musselman, was the local prop master and fixer; the man in charge of outfitting film sets for Western moviemakers. So young Bob was constantly around the sets and the stars.
‘My mother had a food concession and I was the soda pop boy,’ he says. ‘I would always be running around sets delivering cold drinks. So it only made sense that when a director needed kids for a scene they hired me, my sister and the other kids around here. We didn’t get paid much, but it was a lot of fun. But that’s how it was back then, at one point, maybe the early 1950s, just about the whole town worked in the movie business in some way.’
On the outskirts of Moab and next to the Colorado River and Arches National Park some of that Hollywood glory has been preserved. At the Red Cliffs Lodge, a working ranch and hotel, a museum dedicated to showing off movie posters, still photographs and props from the more than 100 movies and television ads filmed at the ranch and surrounding countryside is housed in the main building. An hour here will arm any Western movie buff with enough information to feel as though they were part of the cast. And, to top it off, there is a life-sized cardboard cut-out of John Wayne himself.
Thank you for your article on the Old West and how John Wayne is remembered here. I am from Utah and grew up wishing I was the character that John Wayne was portraying. In fact, that is one of the reasons I wrote my book. I believe that America was made by people just like John Wayne portrayed. Men who stuck to the values they were taught. Even when someone tried to take their dream away. They were the quiet ones that got things done. Thank you. B L Strong, author strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/TheDreamTheMan