Reply #34: If we was, I don't know. There seemed not to be any overt bigotry.

[Cleita]

I did know his family from wife number one. I was friends in high school with one of Wayne's daughters and I don't remember any of them being bigoted or saying that their father was bigoted. In that generation, there were a lot of attitudes that were acceptable that we are shocked about today. Like Bing Crosby, for instance, was really Daddy Dearest with his kids, but at the time no one thought that the child abuse he meted out wasn't proper discipline.

I can honestly say that most white people were bigoted that I knew back then. However, a lot of it was institutionalized and not acted upon in real life. For instance Black and Hispanic classmates were accepted and involved in all school activities, here in California anyway.

Much of the bigotry was perpetrated by the corporations in their hiring practices and the real estate industry in red-lining neighborhoods. Now I know in the south, it was a different thing. I remember the separate drinking fountains and the segregated street cars on a visit to New Orleans at one time.

My point really was that there was more to talk about in deflating the John Wayne legend, like his military service, than that.