The Duke on the Northwest: A John Wayne Memoir
The Duke on the Northwest: A memoir
On a summer’s afternoon in 1972?, Pete and Sue Hanke found themselves and their guests stranded at the dock at Roche Harbor, waiting for a customs inspector to check out their 65-foot wood-hulled schooner, Alcyone. When Pete, then an Eastern Washington orchardist who cruised the Northwest during the summer, stepped ashore to inquire about their status, he encountered a tall, strapping figure with a chiseled face under a yachtsman’s cap.
Hanke immediately recognized John Wayne, the Hollywood icon. The skippers exchanged brief pleasantries, pointed out each other’s boats in the harbor, and went about their business. Nice fella, Hanke thought. And that was that.
Until 7 a.m. the next morning, when the Hankes and their guests were down below in the Alycone, brewing their morning coffee. A skiff pulled alongside and an oversized figure poked his head in the main hatch and bellowed in perhaps America’s most-recognized voice: “Morn-in’, Sailors. Wheeerre’s the skipper?”
“He sat down for a cup of coffee and pretty well filled the cabin of the Alcyone,” Sue Hanke recalls.
They chatted about boats – power versus sail, wood versus fiberglass. Wayne toured the relatively cramped quarters of their classic schooner. Later, he lured his new friends across the channel to show off his own boat – the 139-foot converted minesweeper “Wild Goose,” which had become his summer home in the Pacific Northwest.
So began a warm, summer friendship among the Hankes, John Wayne and the spectacular inland Northwest wonderland that for much of a decade became their common denominator.
To most of the world, the late John Wayne is the definitive Hollywood cowboy, with the deliberate, Midwestern speech, who starred in dozens of westerns and war films from the 1940s to the early 1970s.
In the Pacific Northwest, however, Wayne’s image is a bit more salty, defined less by a Stetson and sixshooter than by his wool cap and his unmistakable boat. He’s remembered as the guy on the bridge of a big, wooden-hulled, World War II vintage minesweeper that became, beginning in the late 60s, something of a cruising fixture from Seattle to the Strait of Juan de Fuca northward to British Columbia and Alaska.
For more than a decade, from the mid-1960s to the late ‘70s, Wayne summered in these waters. Each June, his crew would nose the Wild Goose out of the harbor at Newport Beach, turn north and spend six days climbing the uphill course to Puget Sound and Seattle, where Wayne would climb aboard. Then they would continue north the San Juans, the Gulf Islands, to Pender Harbor, Desolation Sound and Princess Louisa Inlet and beyond.
It would be another year before the Hankes again encountered Wayne. Southbound from Canadian waters, they pulled into Friday Harbor and called their friends, novelist, mariner and pioneer aviator Ernie Gann and his wife Dodi, who lived on their San Juan Island farm.
“Duke’s here,” Dodi Gann reported. “Come on over for dinner!”
It was a lovely evening. Wayne was fond of Gann, “that little bookwriter” who had penned the bestseller “The High and the Mighty;” Wayne had starred in the Oscar-winning film based on the novel. He was a frequent guest at the rustic farm, where the actor and the novelist would spend hours on the porch, quietly playing chess.
But this evening, Wayne was considerably more animated, in part due to something his old pal, Ronald Reagan had done as governor of California. To seat her many guests, Dodi Gann had contrived a makeshift leaf for her table, and it was a tad rickety. So when Wayne wanted to make a point in his cowboy manner – by pounding the table – he rattled the entire dinner and amused his friends.
From that evening on, Wayne and the Hankes remained fast friends, corresponding and linking up each summer at Friday Harbor or various points further north.
“Duke always looked forward to that day when we’d pull up alongside the Alycone and catch up with the Hankes,” recalls Bert Minshall, the droll Englishman who crewed aboard the Wild Goose for some 15 years and eventually became her skipper. “He valued their friendship.”
That friendship was a large part of what kept luring Wayne back year after year. One year, when the Hankes were celebrating their wedding anniversary, Wayne showed up with a couple of bottles of champagne, and expressed disappointment that each of his three marriages was relatively short-lived.
Those sentiments defied his Hollywood “tough guy image,” Sue Hanke says. “He was truly a sweet gentle man, and I don’t think he liked pretentious people. Our daughter, Jenny, crewed for him for a while, and he treated her like his own daughter.”
“And he didn’t look like this,” adds Pete Hanke Jr., pointing to a canned studio photo from the family collection. “He was as bald as a billiard ball. But you only knew that if you spent time on his boat.”
John Wayne was born Marion Michael Morrison in Iowa – about as far from
any ocean as an American can get. But he was raised in southern California. He yearned for a naval career, but failed to get the academy appointment. His acting career began in silent movies, but took off with John Ford’s “Stagecoach” in 1939, followed by a flood of war movies and westerns that soon made his one of the world’s best-known faces.
His first forays north were to cruise with his old friend, Max Wyman, aboard the Wild Goose which Wyman had converted and renamed. In about 1962, Wayne bought the boat and hired a crew to remodel it to accommodate his 6-foot-5? frame. In the summer of 1965, the boat cruised north.
Bert Minshall believes Wayne was never happier than when he was cruising Northwest waters. Occasionally, he hosted movie stars ranging from Bob Hope to Julie Andrews. “But I think he liked getting away from Hollywood,” Minshall recalls. “He was a true sportsman who loved to fish, and he became quite a good fisherman.”
His sporting instincts were fired as he neared Big Bay, the fishing resort on Stuart Island, near the entrance to Desolation Sound. Over the years, Wayne developed a keen friendship with John Davies, a fishing guide who ran a rustic lodge along with his jovial wife, Kay. By the time the Wild Goose arrived, Kay Davies was waiting with a plate of freshly-baked biscuits that became the Duke’s favorites. The crew always looked forward to seeing “Ol’ Crip,” an injury-hobbled bald eagle that scavenged from its perch near the Davies’ lodge.
Ethan Wayne, the youngest son, grew up largely on the boat, and remembers with special warmth the times at Big Bay.
“Of course, we all loved the salmon and the orcas and the oysters. But it was the people who were always so good to us,” Ethan recalls. “Back then, the resorts were more like wilderness camps. It was so remote that my father could get clear of all the stuff down south. People recognized him, of course. But he was treated as another boater and sportsman rather than a movie star.”
Each trip north made the Hollywood man a little more of a Northwest man. One year, the Wild Goose tied up at Friday Harbor near Alycone, and Wayne spotted Sue Hanke plodding up the dock with two big bags of laundry, headed for the town laundromat. Wayne grabbed a bag, slung it over his broad shoulder and joined the venture. So, while the tourists flocked down to the Wild Goose, hoping for a glimpse of their idol, he was strolling through their midst, disguised by the Hankes’ dirty laundry.
More than anything, Ethan says, his father loved that boat. By today’s standards, the Wild Goose was a rather utilitarian and prosaic vessel – wood-hulled, 139 feet with a narrow military profile and a coat of Navy gray paint reflecting its wartime roots. Built in Seattle in 1942, she had been used by the Canadian Navy, then surplused and passed from one owner to the next until Wayne in the early 60s. 
The upper deck consisted of the barebones wheelhouse with its stainless helm, basic engine controls on simple pedastals, an ancient depth sounder with one big rotating eye, a military radar, Loran C and a brass compass. There were brass speaking tubes linking the bridge to the engine room, but these were eventually replaced with an electronic intercom. Other than that, the wheelhouse and engine room remained pretty much the way they’d looked during the war.
Just aft of the bridge was the chimney stack, which became young Ethan’s favorite climbing platform. Further aft was Wayne’s stateroom, with raised roof and a big oak desk.
The main deck consisted of a crew dining room, the galley and the main salon decorated with 60s style wet bar and couches around a wood-burning fireplace. This opened to a big aft deck enclosed in sliding glass, which usually doubled as a dining room. That deck featured a large aquarium, which rarely held any fish because the contraption leaked every time the boat rocked and rolled.
On the lower deck were four guest staterooms, downright spartan by most standards, but nobody seemed to complain. Forward of these was the engine room, with its twin GM diesels, the originals, and the same engines used in WWII submarines. At the bow were crew quarters.
The boat generally had a crew of six or seven – skipper, two deckhands, cook and one or two stewards and an engineer named Arnie who was reputed to be fascinated with ancient alchemy.
Wayne loved spending time in the wheelhouse, Minshall says. “But he really didn’t know how to run the boat, so he left that to us. But he liked to run the ski boat, which had a big 125-horse motor. He must’ve put a million miles on that boat, most of it at full throttle. But he generally had trouble bringing that boat alongside the Goose.”
Underway, the Wild Goose was slow – 11 knots cruising speed – and uncomfortable. Her narrow beam and lack of stabilizers left her susceptible to crossing seas, so she rode “like a whale in its death throes,’ Minshall says.. She had been built hastily just after Pearl Harbor, probably using green wood, which left her prone to rot and warping. Her crew learned not to shift to reverse too quickly.
Peter Hanke, Jr., the Hankes’ son who spent a year crewing on the boat, recalls their efforts to figure out why the engines were prone to overheating. “Turns out, the boat was so limber that she would twist and turn underway, and the shaft was binding.”
The boat, of course, was a means to an end. Wayne loved it in part because of where it took him. Minshall recalls nosing the bow of the boat to within a few feet of the bottom of 120-foot Chatterbox Falls in Princess Louisa Inlet. And he would lead guests up the trail to the top of the falls, which offered a sweeping vista of the magnificent fiord.
Wayne died of cancer in Los Angeles in June 1979, and the Wild Goose has never returned to Northwest waters. She changed hands a couple of times in Southern California before undergoing a $2 million remodel, and now hauls boatloads of tourists around Newport Beach.
Minshall, who is retired in Costa Mesa, near Newport Beach, wrote a book about his experiences, “On Board with the Duke,” which has become something of a collector’s item, selling for $100 and up on eBay. Now and then, he ventures down to the harbor to visit the boat he ran those many years. “They changed everything,” he grumbles. “Looks like a floating wedding cake, with seating up top for 130 people. I cringe when I see her.”
Wayne’s heirs remain based in Southern California, where several have worked in movies. Ethan Wayne, who spent his childhood climbing around the Wild Goose, is a sometime actor who runs the family business, Wayne Enterprises. The family donated the waterfront site that became the John Wayne Marina on Sequim Bay, operated by the Port of Port Angeles. And they still own a home near the marina, and some 160 acres of prime land on Sequim Bay, which they plan to develop with 232 clustered retirement homes, 25 rental cabins, a lodge and spa. Work could begin as early as this year (2008).
Ethan visits the home in Sequim once or twice a year. “And I suppose I inherited the boating bug,” he says. “I keep my trawler here at Newport Beach, but I look forward to cruising on a friend’s boat out of Friday Harbor each year.”
The Hankes long ago sold their Eastern Washington orchard, moved to Port Townsend and started Puget Sound Express, which runs tourist and whaling cruises, including summertime routes between Port Townsend and San Juan Island. The younger Hanke, who earned his sea legs on the Wild Goose, now runs the family charter business.
They’ve kept a few letters, photos and mementoes of their encounters with John Wayne. But they have to rummage through cardboard boxes to find them. And it’s not their style to market their friendship to their tourist clientele..
Because that relationship was never about celebrity. It was about people and boats in a corner of the world where celebrity and wealth are ultimately trumped by character, and where all are dwarfed by the sheer scale and magnificence of Mother Nature.
