Film Stories From The Book:
Hollywood of the Rockies

By: Frederic B. Wildfang

Harry Carey, Jr.

After making an appearance here at the short-lived “Durango Western Film Festival” in 1988, Harry Carey, Jr. and his wife Marilyn picked up from Sherman Oaks, California (a suburb near Los Angeles where Harry had lived for 70 years) and moved to Durango. Harry Carey, Jr. describes his old home in Los Angeles in his book Company of Heroes: My Life as an Actor in the John Ford Stock Company as follows:

If I look north from our home in Sherman Oaks, California, I see the hills where I was born. If I look west, I see the hills where my dad died. East is Universal Studio, a company my father, Harry Carey Senior, helped to put on the map by making two-reeler westerns. To the west is Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley. I’ve made so many TV westerns out there that I’ve lost count. It’s all houses now. I’m moving out of Los Angeles — too crowded.

Harry Carey, Jr. (or “Ol’ Dobe,” as John Ford called him) appeared in ten classic John Ford films — made between 1948 and 1964. Three of them — She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, and Cheyenne Autumn — were shot in Monument Valley, Utah, just a couple of hours west of Durango — close to where the San Juan River empties into Lake Powell.

“Maybe this book,” says Dobe, “is my attempt at a kind of ‘portable’ landmark”:

My journey has been that of a character actor. I’ve worked the great and the not-so-great. But mostly I’ve worked with men and women who loved their profession, and who like me, had kids to raise and houses to pay for. I’ve worked with many people, but I’ve only had one teacher. That man was John Ford. He was my nemesis and my hero. There were times when I was not an admirer — but when the day’s work was done — I loved him. He once introduced himself by saying, ‘My name is John Ford. I make westerns.’ He sure did.”