Iowa farmer recalls his friendship with John Wayne and Duke’s desire to visit his home state one more time
By Carol Carpenter Hanson
Longtime friends John Wayne (left) and John Schild (right), pictured together in 1978 during one of Schild’s visits to Wayne’s cattle ranch in Arizona. “He was very conscious of his height. I backed away to have conversations with him,” said Schild. Photo by Mildred Schild
John Wayne wanted to go home, he told the Iowa cattleman standing before him. The legendary movie star wanted to touch base with his roots back in Iowa, where he had spent the first seven years of his life.
He wanted to reconnect with the places where he had spent his early childhood, to see that Iowa area called “Little Switzerland” and to visit his cousins back in Malcom who had been estranged since his parents’ divorce decades earlier.
“You just say when, John,” said his confidante, Belle Plaine farmer John Schild. “I’ll come pick you up at the airport and chauffeur you around wherever you want to go. No one has to know you’re there.”
The two men stood facing each other in the feedlot of Wayne’s Arizona ranch. It was 1978. Since meeting around 25 years earlier, they had met occasionally and built a friendship through their common interest in raising Hereford cattle. But they shared other things in common. Besides being native Iowans, Schild’s niece had married a relative of Wayne’s and both were struggling with recurring health issues: Wayne had a lung removed in 1964 due to lung cancer; while Schild suffered from the effects of exposure to Agent Orange from an earlier incident and had been given a life expectancy diagnosis of five years.
“He made a movie in southwestern Utah and was exposed to some residual radiation, that had drifted from a Nevada site for above-ground atomic testing,” said Schild.
Coincidentally, while Wayne was exposed to radiation through the soil and trail dust in the area, Schild was exposed to it through the sheep ewes he had purchased from a ranch in the same area. Most of the animals died in railroad cars en route to Belle Plaine and state labs later tested them for radiation exposure.
Both men were great storytellers with a myriad of life experiences behind them and many tales to tell. Each had rubbed shoulders with several U.S. presidents and they were both passionate about land and water conservation, having strongly promoted farming practices to prevent soil erosion.
Both answered to the name “John,” but still remembered the sting from their early childhoods when family members changed their names. Wayne’s mother took away his given middle name, Robert, and gave it to his younger brother when Wayne was five. It was a hurt that stayed with Wayne all his life, according to biographies on the popular actor.
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