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operation until 1924 on North Verdugo Road. Wayne occasionally spoke of watching Kalem star Helen Holmes working on the streets of Glendale. Production crews and actors were frequent sights around town, where young Duke, along with other neighborhood kids, watched with open mouth and beating heart.
    Duke Morrison’s learning experiences were not always pleasant, but deeply imprinted on his ethical compass. He remembered catching a bee, and tying a thread around the creature so all it could do was fly in circles. A boy who was about three years older and had recently arrived from Poland walked by and said, “Don’t do that.” Morrison ignored him and kept tormenting the bee, at which point, he remembered, “The roof fell in.”
    He found himself lying on the ground with the Polish boy standing over him. With a heavy accent, the boy said, “I’ve just come from a war, from Poland. Don’t ever be cruel to animals. Or people.”
    “It was quite a lesson,” Duke said. “I’ll never forget it.”
    The
Examiner
was a morning paper, so Duke had to get up at four in the morning for his deliveries. He had begun playing football, and after school there was practice, and then he would make deliveries for the drugstore on his bicycle.
    While Duke was growing up, his parents continued to fight. Sometimes Molly—“a very beautiful red head,” according to Fred Stofft—would come sailing into the pharmacy in high dudgeon to berate Clyde for some perceived or actual failure. Clyde’s drinking had picked up and Molly’s anger hadn’t abated. She insisted that Duke drag his little brother along wherever he happened to be going.
    In 1919, Duke joined the Boy Scouts and stayed active in the troop until high school graduation, although he never made Eagle Scout. He also joined the YMCA, which put the boys on boats, inspiring a love for the sea that lasted the rest of his life.
    In 1921, Clyde and Mary Morrison separated. Bob went with his mother to Long Beach, Duke stayed with his father in Glendale. Each of the boys developed a personality that was the antithesis of the parent they lived with—Duke became ambitious and driven like his mother, while Bob was compliant and easygoing like his father. Not that Mary Morrison cared, for Bob would always be her favorite child, which provoked no end of quizzical confusion from outsiders observing the family dynamic over the years.
    From the public record, Duke’s years in Glendale could be drawn from Booth Tarkington’s
Penrod
stories: in March of 1920, Duke made the pages of the local paper for the first time: “Clyde Morrison’s eldest son Marion M. got the thumb of his left hand caught between the chain and sprocket wheel of his bicycle last Saturday while tuning it up for practice on the boy’s speedway at the corner of Hawthorne and Central Avenue, in hope of entering some of the races. The flesh was badly lacerated and the joint spread somewhat, necessitating the care of a surgeon, but the boy is getting along very favorably.”
    It seems that Duke had problems with two-wheel vehicles; another time he was riding a motorcycle down Brand Boulevard on the trolley tracks. It was raining, he lost control of the bike and laid it down. The motorcycle slid and wedged itself under a mailbox. Duke just walked away and left it—motorcycles were too dangerous.
    That same month, Clyde bought a six-room house at 313 West Garfield Avenue in Glendale. The year before, they had sold a house at 404 North Isabel and had bided their time living in an apartment over the Glendale Pharmacy.
    The boy was still on the quiet side, and between his job delivering papers in the morning, making deliveries for the pharmacy, attending Boy Scout meetings and DeMolay, he couldn’t have been spending much time at home—which was probably the general idea. In whatever spare time he had, he would haunt the Glendale library, reading the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and Arthur