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to beat archrival San Bernardino 15–10 in the semifinal for the state championship. Duke played left guard on both offense and defense, and the local paper’s breathless reportage left no doubt that Notre Dame’s Four Horsemen were going to have some competition: “The whole line played well . . . Dotson, Morrison, Brucker and Phillipps showed up well both on offensive and defensive.”
    “Morrison was supposed to be opposite
the
prep guard in Southern California,” reported the
Glendale Evening News
’ high school football reporter. “If he was, Morrison has established his right to that title, for he made that jackrabbit look like a fuzzy bunny. He also uncorked some good points when [teammate Howard] Elliott was taken out.”
    At this point, Duke’s interests focused mostly on athletics, but he was also developing an interest in performing. That said, athletics definitely had the edge. He played everything and he played it well. A neighborhood girl named Mildred Power remembered that she used to stand outside a fence on East Broadway where the local boys erected a makeshift basketball court. The most prominent of them, by dint of his size, curly hair, and overall good looks, was young Morrison. “Duke was the tallest and the most handsome thing you ever saw. I was in awe.”
    Throughout these years, the Morrison family was moving constantly. The Glendale public library doesn’t have a complete run of city directories, but the ones they do have show different addresses for the family nearly every year between 1915 and 1925. They first show up in Glendale in 1915 living at 421 South Isabel; a year later they’re at 315 South Geneva. By 1919 they’re at 443 West Colorado; two years after that they’re at 815 South Central; and in 1922 they’re at 129 South Kenwood.
    What makes all this intriguing is that Clyde Morrison bought a six-room house in 1920. The address was 313 Garfield Avenue. Either he rented the house out, or, more likely, lost it soon after buying it—rental income would have made a yearly move unnecessary. Wayne’s attitude toward his father gradually became one of affectionate forbearance. He evinced sympathy for him and the values he taught him, which included football. “I was very envious of Duke,” said a Glendale friend named Frank Hoyt. “His father would use every spare moment to teach him how to pass the ball and tackle. They were very close.”
    Morrison was regarded as a top athlete, but with a slight problem: “He could have been a great football player, but he never wanted to hurt anybody,” said one teammate. The family always needed money, so Duke learned the value of constant effort. Eugene Clarke, a friend in the Glendale period who followed Duke to USC, remembered that they worked on ice wagons, ran errands, mowed lawns, and filled in the times they weren’t working by playing baseball and football.
    There are people who always look like themselves, even as children, and Duke Morrison was one of them. As a boy, his face was round, but his eyes already had their familiar oriental shape. By the time he entered high school, he had definitely begun to assume the form the world would know. He was lean and very tall, over six feet, with dark, curly brown hair. He had another growth spurt in high school and by graduation weighed 170 and had assumed his full height of six feet and three and three quarter inches. His face lengthened, which made his cheekbones more prominent, and his blue eyes peered out from behind almond-shaped lids. He was gorgeous.
    “I don’t think it’s possible to realize from watching his movies how absolutely stunningly handsome he was then,” remembered a classmate named Dorothy Hacker. “His looks alone could stop traffic. He was about the handsomest young man that ever walked on two legs.”
    Dorothy Hacker sounds as if she was carrying a blazing torch for Duke Morrison, but she wasn’t the only one. “My girlfriend and I used to go into the