On Board With the Duke: John Wayne and the Wild Goose

On Board With the Duke: John Wayne and the Wild Goose by Minshall, Bert. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780929765136.

Here, through an extraordinary combination of text and pictures, is the story of John Wayne, American legend, and his life on board the famed Wild Goose. The 136-foot ship, a former U.S. Navy minesweeper, was the actors favorite retreat and proudest possession. During the last sixteen years of his iife, Wayne spent much of his leisure time aboard the yacht cruising off Mexico, the Pacific Northwest and Catalina. The Wild Goose came to dominate his life in a way that only his family and work had done before. Sharing that life in this entertaining memoir is Captain Bert Minshall, who joined the Goose as a green deckhand in late 1963 and ended up not only as Waynes last skipper, but as his friend and confidant. It is a story that is at once adventurous and intimate, at times touched with exuberant humor, at times with tragedy. These pages reveal the legendary Duke: charismatic, fun-loving, occasionally difficult and prone to angry outbursts, a movie star who enjoyed a good laugh or a prank with the abandon of a young boy, a sailor at heart who delighted in his big, aging navy workhorse. From Captain Minshalls first meeting with Wayne - when the actor calmly and deliberately spit on the deckhands new deckshoes, claiming it was "good luck" - to the actors last poignant voyage to Catalina shortly before his death, On Board with the Duke is a revealing look at a complex and fascinating man.