A bronze statue of John Wayne, which measures eight feet and eight inches in height, has been put up at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma.

"It's always an amazing thing for our family whenever we get to be out among his fans because he's almost been dead for 30 years, but there are 3-year-old children who come up to me and tell me how much they love him," Wayne's granddaughter Anita LaCaba Swift, who was at the ceremony, said.

The public house where John Wayne drank in the 1952 movie, The Quiet Man is being re-located to its home in County Mayo, Ireland.

Hollywood producers converted Pat Cohan’s shop in Cong, Ireland, into a bar for the Oscar-winning film, even though the interiors were filmed in a Tinseltown studio.

For decades, fans of Wayne and the film have made pilgrimages to the small Irish town and were disappointed to find the inside of Pat Cohan's Bar completely different to those shown in the movie.

However, members of The Quiet Man Movie Club in Ireland have raised enough money to transport the set back to Cong and hope to open for business in June 2006.

Pat Cohan's owner John Connelly told the Western People newspaper, "Thousands upon thousands of tourists come to Cong each year and they walk into the building but they're deceived by it. They want to have a drink where John Wayne drank. The place was crying out to be transformed.

Michael Wayne, the oldest son of legendary Wayne has died of heart failure at the age of  68 April 2, 2003.

Since John Wayne's death  Michael Wayne had been the chairman of the board for the John Wayne Foundation and the John Wayne Cancer Institute as well as having a successful career as a producer.

 

In April 2004 the Duke received the honor of being on a U.S. Postage stamp. His stamp is featured in the "Legends of Hollywood" collection. His stamp was released at a private fund-raiser for the John Wayne Cancer Institute.

This is not the first time for him to appear on a stamp. The Duke was on a 25 cent stamp in 1990 in a stamp collection honoring classic films released in 1939. He was shown as the Ringo Kid id the movie Stagecoach.

8/14/07