Alyssa Jane, Wisconsin Dells, WI (2025)

11/19/2025

In 1923, a 66-year-old woman wrote a novel about a 58-year-old woman reclaiming her s*xuality—and the entire country exploded in outrage.
Her name was Gertrude Atherton. And the book that scandalized America? Black Oxen—a story about a woman who undergoes an experimental rejuvenation treatment and emerges looking thirty again.
But here's what made critics lose their minds: she doesn't do it to find a husband. She doesn't do it to please society. She does it to reclaim her power, her vitality, and yes—her s*xuality.
The novel became an instant bestseller. It was also branded dangerous.
Male critics were horrified. How dare a woman suggest that female desire doesn't die at forty? How dare she write about an older woman competing s*xually with younger women? How dare she give a woman power without punishing her for it?
But Gertrude Atherton had been scandalizing readers for thirty-five years—and at sixty-six, she wasn't about to stop.
Born in 1857 in San Francisco, Gertrude married at nineteen to a man her family approved of but she didn't love. The marriage was miserable. She was restless, ambitious, hungry for more than managing a household.
Then in 1887, her husband died suddenly at sea.
Society expected her to mourn quietly, remarry respectably, and fade into widowhood.
Instead? She felt liberated.
With a small inheritance and burning ambition, she moved to New York, then Europe, and dove into literary circles. She began writing novels that shocked everyone—stories about women who wanted careers, who chafed at marriage, who pursued pleasure and power unapologetically.
Critics called her work "unwomanly." They said she wrote like a man. They accused her of being vulgar and inappropriate.
She kept writing.
Novel after novel, Gertrude created women who wanted s*x and didn't pretend otherwise. Women who pursued ambition without apology. Women who refused to be tamed by marriage or motherhood. Women who aged without becoming invisible.
These weren't nice women. They weren't always likable. They were complicated, flawed, hungry—exactly like real women.
And then came Black Oxen in 1923.
The experimental treatment in the book—the Steinach procedure—was real. Dr. Eugen Steinach had developed a glandular treatment that supposedly restored youth. Wealthy people, including Sigmund Freud, actually underwent it.
Atherton took this real medical phenomenon and asked a revolutionary question: What if a woman used it not to please others, but to reclaim herself?
The result was explosive. Women wrote to thank her for acknowledging that they still felt desire, still wanted power, still existed after forty. But others were scandalized. One reviewer called it "dangerous" because it suggested older women might compete with younger women.
Male critics were particularly disturbed. How dare older women refuse to fade gracefully?
But here's what made Atherton truly revolutionary: she didn't just write about individual women seeking freedom. She dissected the systems designed to control them—how society weaponized "respectability," how marriage could be a trap disguised as security, how aging was used to render women powerless.
And she lived the audacity she wrote about.
After her husband's death, Gertrude never remarried. She traveled constantly—Europe, New York, California. She moved in circles with Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. She wrote over fifty novels, supported women's suffrage, and lived independently until the very end.
When she was in her eighties, still writing, a young interviewer asked if she had any regrets.
"Only that I didn't write more," she said.
Gertrude Atherton died in 1948 at age ninety-one, having published her last novel just three years earlier. She worked until nearly the end, never losing her edge, never becoming the respectable old lady society demanded.
But here's the tragedy: Despite being a bestseller in her time, despite writing fifty novels, despite influencing generations—Gertrude Atherton is largely forgotten today.
Literary history remembers the men of her era—Jack London, Frank Norris, Ambrose Bierce. They're taught in schools. Their books stay in print.
Atherton? A footnote. Occasionally mentioned in feminist studies. Rarely read.
And that's exactly the erasure she spent her career fighting.
Because Gertrude Atherton proved something that still makes people uncomfortable: women have always wanted more than they were allowed to want.
Female desire—s*xual, professional, political—has always existed, even when literature pretended it didn't.
She wrote women who were angry, ambitious, s*xual, powerful, flawed. She wrote them when women were supposed to be pure, passive, self-sacrificing angels. She wrote older women who refused to become invisible.
Black Oxen shocked America in 1923 because it suggested a woman's life didn't end at forty. That desire, ambition, and vitality could belong to older women too. That rejuvenation wasn't about pleasing men—it was about reclaiming yourself.
A century later, we're still having that conversation.
Older women are still told to age gracefully (which means invisibly). Female s*xuality is still controversial. Women's ambition is still threatening.
Gertrude Atherton saw all of this in 1890. And 1900. And 1920. And 1940.
She wrote about it for sixty years, never softening, never compromising, never pretending women's desires were anything other than what they were: real, powerful, and worth fighting for.
She married young because that's what women did. She was widowed early and discovered freedom felt better than propriety. She wrote fifty novels that shocked and challenged readers to see women as full human beings.
And then history mostly forgot her—which is exactly the kind of erasure she spent her career exposing.
So here's what we do: We remember her now.
We remember the woman who wrote about female desire when it was scandalous. We remember the writer who gave older women their s*xuality back when society wanted them invisible. We remember the novelist who refused to write "nice" women because real women aren't always nice—they're complicated, ambitious, s*xual, angry, powerful.
In 1923, she wrote about an older woman reclaiming her s*xuality, and America lost its mind.
Maybe it's time we recognized that Gertrude Atherton was right all along.
Women have always wanted more. And there's never been anything wrong with that.

11/15/2025

The nursery rhyme you sang as a child was based on a real 9-year-old girl who saved a dying lamb—and accidentally made history. "Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb..."You probably sang it in kindergarten. Maybe you sang it to your own children. But did you know Mary was real? And so was her lamb? This is the true story behind one of the most famous nursery rhymes in history. In March 1815, on a cold morning in Sterling, Massachusetts, nine-year-old Mary Sawyer was helping her father with chores in the barn. They discovered that one of their ewes had given birth to twin lambs overnight—but something was wrong. One lamb was healthy and nursing. The other had been rejected by its mother and was lying in the straw, barely breathing, too weak to even stand. Without its mother's care and milk, the tiny creature was dying of cold and hunger. Mary's heart broke at the sight. "Can I take it inside?" she begged her father. Her father shook his head. "No, Mary. It's almost dead anyway. Even if we try, it probably won't survive. "But Mary couldn't bear to watch the lamb die. She pleaded with her father until he finally relented—though he made it clear he thought it was hopeless. When they returned to the house, Mary's mother agreed to let her try. Mary wrapped the freezing lamb in an old garment and held it close to the fireplace, cradling it in her arms through the long night. She didn't know if it would make it to morning. The lamb was so weak it couldn't even swallow at first. But Mary refused to give up. By morning, against all odds, the lamb was standing. Over the next few days, with Mary's constant care—feeding it milk, keeping it warm, nursing it back to strength—the little creature recovered completely. And then something magical happened. The lamb, whom Mary had saved from death, became utterly devoted to her. It recognized her voice. It came running when she called. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb truly was "sure to go. "One morning before school, Mary called out to her lamb as she was leaving. The lamb came trotting over immediately. Mary's mischievous older brother, Nat, grinned and said, "Let's take the lamb to school with us! "Mary hesitated—she knew it was against the rules—but the idea was too tempting. She agreed. She tried to smuggle the lamb into the one-room Redstone School by hiding it in a basket under her desk, hoping it would stay quiet. For a while, her plan worked. The lamb nestled silently beneath her seat as the lesson began. Then Mary was called to the front of the classroom to recite her lesson. As she stood and began to read aloud, the lamb suddenly bleated loudly and leaped out from under her desk, following Mary to the front of the room. The classroom erupted. The students burst into laughter at the sight of a fluffy white lamb wandering the aisles, bleating and looking for Mary. Even the teacher, Polly Kimball, "laughed outright"—though she gently told Mary that the lamb would have to go home. Mary, embarrassed but smiling, led her lamb outside to wait in a shed until school ended. She thought that would be the end of it—a funny story to tell at dinner. But someone else was watching. Among the visitors at the school that day was a young man named John Roulstone, a college-bound student staying with his uncle, the local minister. He was charmed by the sight of Mary's devoted lamb following her into school. The next day, John rode his horse across the fields to the little schoolhouse and handed Mary a slip of paper. On it, he'd written three simple stanzas:*"Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go. It followed her to school one day,
That was against the rule.
It made the children laugh and play,
To see a lamb at school..."*Mary treasured that piece of paper. She kept it for years, along with the memory of the lamb she'd saved. The lamb lived to be four years old, bearing three lambs of her own before she was accidentally killed by a cow in the barn. Mary's mother saved some of the lamb's wool and knitted stockings for Mary, which she treasured for the rest of her life. But the story doesn't end there. In 1830, a well-known writer and editor named Sarah Josepha Hale published a collection called Poems for Our Children. Among them was a poem called "Mary's Lamb"—the same verses John Roulstone had written, plus three additional stanzas with a moral lesson about kindness to animals. The poem spread like wildfire. It was reprinted in schoolbooks across America. Children everywhere began singing it. By the 1850s, it was one of the most famous children's poems in the country. But here's where it gets even more remarkable: In 1877, nearly sixty years after Mary saved that lamb, inventor Thomas Edison was testing his brand-new phonograph—the first machine ever capable of recording and playing back sound. He needed something to recite to test if it worked. He chose "Mary Had a Little Lamb. "Edison's voice reciting those words became the first audio recording in human history. The poem that began with a nine-year-old girl's compassion became the first sound ever captured by technology. As for Mary herself, she lived a long, quiet life. She married, raised a family, and rarely talked about the famous poem until she was an elderly woman. In 1876, at age 70, Mary finally came forward to share her story publicly when she donated the stockings her mother had made from her lamb's wool to help raise money to save Boston's Old South Meeting House. She sold autographed cards tied with yarn from those stockings, telling the world: "I am the Mary. This is my lamb's wool. "People were astonished. The woman behind the nursery rhyme was real—and she was still alive. Mary Sawyer died in 1889 at age 83. Today, a statue of her little lamb stands in Sterling, Massachusetts, commemorating the day a nine-year-old girl's compassion for a dying animal created one of the most enduring stories in children's literature. The lesson of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" isn't just about a pet following its owner. It's about what happened before that—about a little girl who refused to let a helpless creature die, who fought for its life when everyone else had given up, who showed that kindness and determination can create miracles. Mary saved her lamb. And in return, that lamb gave her immortality. The next time you hear someone sing "Mary had a little lamb," remember: it wasn't just a nursery rhyme. It was a true story about a real girl who taught us that compassion matters, that small acts of kindness ripple through time, and that sometimes the gentlest hearts change the world. Mary Sawyer: 1806-1889
The girl who saved a lamb—and created a legend.

11/15/2025

She asked one question that shattered centuries of silence: "Why is woman always defined as the Other?"
Then she answered it—and the world called her dangerous.
Simone de Beauvoir published The Second S*x in 1949, and it detonated like a bomb in the polite drawing rooms of postwar Paris. The book did something revolutionary: it treated women's existence as a philosophical problem worth serious intellectual investigation.
That shouldn't have been revolutionary. But it was.
Because for centuries, male philosophers had theorized about humanity, consciousness, freedom, and existence—always with "man" as the default human and "woman" as a mysterious deviation requiring explanation.
Simone flipped the entire framework.
She asked: What if women aren't mysterious? What if everything society teaches about femininity—the passivity, the modesty, the dependence, the decorative existence—isn't natural destiny but deliberate construction?
What if "woman" as the world understood her was a cage built so carefully that most people mistook it for biology?
The answer filled 700 pages and changed history.
The Second S*x argued that women were made, not born. That femininity was performance, learned through thousands of small lessons starting in childhood. That every "natural" female trait—nurturing, submissiveness, vanity, weakness—was actually trained into girls through relentless social conditioning.
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
That single sentence contained dynamite.
Because if women were made, they could be unmade. If femininity was construction, it could be demolished. If gender roles were artificial, they could be rejected.
Simone wrote it all down in precise, philosophical language—building arguments the way male philosophers had for millennia, except she was analyzing the very system that had silenced women's voices for all those millennia.
The reaction was immediate and vicious.
Catholic Church? Condemned it. Put it on the Index of Forbidden Books. Declared it dangerous to morality and faith.
Critics? Called her "unsatisfied," "frigid," "masculine." Said she was bitter, lonely, incapable of understanding real womanhood because clearly something was wrong with her.
Fellow intellectuals? Many dismissed her as Jean-Paul Sartre's student. His lover. His intellectual shadow. Surely this book was really his ideas, filtered through her typewriter?
The fact that Simone was already an accomplished philosopher, an established novelist, a brilliant thinker in her own right—none of that mattered. She was a woman, so her thoughts must be derivative, must be borrowed, must be somehow less original than a man's.
This was exactly the dynamic she'd described in her book.
Women could think, but their thinking was never quite legitimate. Never quite their own. Always suspect, always secondary, always understood in relation to a man—his wife, his student, his lover, never simply herself.
Simone and Jean-Paul Sartre were partners—intellectual equals who influenced each other's work, maintained a lifelong open relationship built on honesty and philosophical companionship. But history kept trying to shrink her into his footnote.
She refused.
She kept writing. Essays. Novels. Memoirs. Philosophy. For decades, she produced work that challenged how people thought about freedom, ethics, aging, death, gender, power.
But The Second S*x remained her earthquake.
Women read it and recognized themselves. Recognized the thousand invisible ways they'd been shaped into smaller versions of what they could have been. Recognized how "choice" often meant choosing between limited, pre-approved options. Recognized how even their desires had been carefully curated to serve a system that benefited from their compliance.
The book spread slowly at first, then explosively. Translated into dozens of languages. Passed hand-to-hand among women who'd never articulated why their lives felt constrained but knew something was wrong.
It became the philosophical foundation for second-wave feminism. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique owes a debt to Simone. Gloria Steinem cited her. Generations of feminist thinkers built on her framework.
But here's what often gets forgotten:
Writing The Second S*x wasn't just an intellectual exercise for Simone. It was personal survival.
She lived in a world that told women to be decorative, to be silent, to exist in service of men. She chose instead to think, to write, to claim authority over ideas. Every page was rebellion against everything her society told her she should be.
To be a female philosopher in 1949 Paris wasn't simply unusual. It was transgressive. It meant claiming space in cafés and universities and intellectual debates where women were supposed to be muses, not thinkers. It meant enduring constant dismissal, constant questioning of her credentials, constant suggestions that she should be doing something more feminine.
She did it anyway.
For decades.
And she paid the price. Critics never stopped calling her unfeminine, unnatural, angry. They psychoanalyzed her, suggested she had "issues" with men or with her own womanhood. They tried every possible explanation except the obvious one: that she was simply right.
Simone de Beauvoir died in 1986, at age 78. Thousands attended her funeral—women who'd never met her but whose lives she'd changed by giving them permission to think freely.
Today, The Second S*x is considered one of the most important philosophical texts of the 20th century. It's taught in universities worldwide. Scholars write dissertations analyzing her arguments.
But the world she described—where women are always "the Other," always defined in relation to men, always secondary—hasn't disappeared.
It's just gotten subtler.
Every woman who speaks with authority and gets called "bossy." Every female expert interrupted by a less-qualified man. Every time a woman's ideas are credited to her male colleague. Every professional woman told to smile more, be warmer, take up less space.
The Second S*x is happening, still, every day.
Which means the rebellion Simone described is still necessary.
The rebellion isn't always loud.
Sometimes it looks like a woman speaking without apologizing for her knowledge. Sometimes it looks like claiming credit for her own ideas. Sometimes it looks like refusing to shrink, to soften, to perform femininity as reassurance.
Sometimes it looks like a pen held steady, writing truths that make people uncomfortable.
Simone de Beauvoir didn't tell women to be polite revolutionaries. She told them to think—rigorously, critically, fearlessly. To question everything they'd been taught about their nature, their limits, their proper place.
Because thinking freely, for a woman, is the most dangerous act of all.
It means refusing to be the Other. Refusing to exist only in reflection of men. Refusing to accept that biology is destiny or that femininity is fate.
She asked: "Why is woman always the Other?"
She answered it in 700 pages that the Church banned and critics called dangerous.
She was right.
And 75 years later, we're still living the revolution she described.
To be a woman and to think freely isn't disobedience.
It's evolution.
And it started with one philosopher who refused to let the world tell her what women were allowed to think.

11/15/2025

They found her frozen in a railroad boxcar with nothing but a note pinned to her coat—and she grew up to save the town that almost let her die.
Winter, 1892. Laramie, Wyoming. A railroad worker heard crying from an empty freight car and found a girl, maybe four years old, blue-lipped and shaking. Pinned to her threadbare coat was a scrap of paper: "Her name is Josephine. I can't feed her. Please be kinder than I could be."
Most folks wanted to send her to an orphanage back East. But Martha Chen, a Chinese-American laundress who'd lost her own daughter to scarlet fever, took one look at those frightened eyes and said, "She stays with me."
The town talked. A Chinese woman raising a white child? Improper. Unnatural. But Martha ignored them, teaching Josephine to read by candlelight, to calculate laundry accounts, to stand tall when people whispered. Josephine learned two languages, two sets of traditions, and one unshakable truth: family wasn't about blood—it was about who showed up when the world turned cold.
At seventeen, Josephine was working at the town's only medical office when diphtheria swept through Laramie in the winter of 1905. The doctor fell ill on day three. Josephine, who'd absorbed everything she'd observed over five years of filing records and preparing instruments, stepped up. For two weeks, she barely slept—mixing treatments, monitoring patients, organizing quarantine protocols she'd read about in the doctor's journals.
When it ended, twenty-three people had survived who shouldn't have. The same townspeople who'd once questioned her existence now owed her their children's lives. The doctor, recovered and humbled, offered to sponsor her medical education. Martha Chen lived just long enough to see Josephine accepted to nursing school, the first step toward becoming one of Wyoming's early female physicians.
Years later, someone asked Josephine if she ever wondered about her birth mother. She thought for a moment, then shook her head. "The woman who found me frozen gave me survival. The woman who raised me gave me purpose. That's more than most people get from one mother—I was lucky enough to have two."
The boxcar that nearly became her coffin stood rusting by the depot for decades, a reminder that sometimes the coldest moments lead to the warmest legacies. Josephine Chen practiced medicine in Laramie for forty years, delivering babies, setting bones, and saving lives—proving that being saved isn't the end of the story. Sometimes it's just the beginning.

11/15/2025

She invented the technology that makes your glasses, cameras, and phone screens work. Her name was deliberately left out of history—until now.
In 1917, Katharine Burr Blodgett walked into the General Electric research laboratory in Schenectady, New York, and became the first woman ever hired there.
She was 18 years old.
The men in the lab didn't know what to make of her. Women weren't supposed to be in physics. They certainly weren't supposed to be brilliant at it.
Katharine was both.
But to understand how an 18-year-old woman ended up in one of America's most prestigious research labs, you need to understand what came before.
Katharine was born in 1898, just weeks after her father was murdered. George Blodgett, a patent attorney, was shot and killed in a home invasion robbery in Schenectady before his daughter was born.
Her mother, Katherine Burr Blodgett, refused to let tragedy define their lives. She was determined that her daughter would have every educational opportunity—even in a world that told women their only career was marriage.
Young Katharine was brilliant. Frighteningly brilliant. She excelled in math and science when girls were told those subjects would damage their delicate brains.
At 15, she graduated from high school. At 17, she finished Bryn Mawr College—one of the few colleges that would even admit women. She graduated with a degree in physics when most physics departments wouldn't allow women through the door.
Then she did something audacious. She applied for a job at General Electric's research laboratory.
The lab director was Irving Langmuir, who would later win the Nobel Prize for his work on surface chemistry. When he met Katharine, he saw something the rest of the world was trained to miss: genius has no gender.
He hired her on the spot.
She was the first woman ever employed in GE's research lab. The first woman to work alongside the men who were inventing the modern world.
But Langmuir knew she needed more than a job. She needed credentials that would make it impossible for the scientific community to dismiss her.
He told her to go to Cambridge University in England and get a Ph.D. in physics.
In 1926, Katharine Burr Blodgett became the first woman ever to earn a doctorate in physics from Cambridge University.
She was 28 years old. And she was just getting started.
She returned to GE and began working on a problem that had frustrated scientists for decades: reflection.
Every surface that interacts with light—glass, lenses, mirrors—reflects some of that light back. This creates glare. Distortion. Lost clarity.
For telescopes, it meant dimmer images. For cameras, it meant hazy photographs. For eyeglasses, it meant distracting reflections. For cinema projectors, it meant less vibrant films.
Katharine wondered: what if you could eliminate reflection entirely?
Working with Langmuir, she developed a revolutionary technique. She discovered that by depositing ultra-thin molecular layers onto glass—layers so thin they were only a few molecules thick—she could manipulate how light behaved on the surface.
If you layered these films precisely, the reflected light waves would cancel each other out through destructive interference.
The result? Glass that didn't reflect. Glass that appeared almost invisible.
She called it "non-reflective coating."
The world had never seen anything like it.
In 1938, when she perfected the technique, she held up a piece of coated glass and photographers couldn't capture it on film—it was so non-reflective that cameras couldn't see it properly. The images showed what looked like empty space where the glass should be.
She'd made glass invisible.
The applications were immediate and revolutionary. Eyeglasses with her coating eliminated glare, making vision clearer. Microscope lenses could magnify with unprecedented clarity. Telescope lenses could capture fainter stars. Camera lenses produced sharper photographs.
Cinema projection improved dramatically—audiences watching movies in the 1940s and 50s were seeing Katharine's invention, though almost none of them knew her name.
During World War II, her work became critical to the military. She developed improved methods for detecting submarines. She created better de-icing techniques for aircraft wings. She improved smoke screens that saved lives.
By the end of her career, she held eight patents. Her techniques became foundational to modern materials science. The Langmuir-Blodgett film deposition method—named partially for her—is still used today in nanotechnology and advanced materials research.
Your smartphone screen uses her technology. Your anti-glare glasses use her invention. Every precision optical instrument from microscopes to space telescopes builds on her work.
She revolutionized optics. And history almost forgot her name.
Because she was a woman in science, her achievements were consistently attributed to her male colleagues. Langmuir received the Nobel Prize—deservedly, for his own work—but Katharine's contributions were minimized or ignored.
When she was recognized, it was often with surprise. As if brilliance in a woman was an anomaly rather than evidence that women had always been brilliant—just systematically denied the opportunity to prove it.
Katharine never demanded the spotlight. She wasn't interested in fame. She was interested in clarity—in glass, in science, in understanding how the world worked at its most fundamental level.
She worked at GE for 44 years until her retirement in 1963. She never married, dedicating her life to research.
She died in 1979 at age 81. Her obituaries were brief. The world moved on quickly, forgetting the woman who'd made the world clearer.
But every time you put on glasses without glare, you're using her invention.
Every time you take a photograph with a clear lens, that's her legacy.
Every time you watch a movie projected crisply on a screen, you're seeing her work.
Every woman who walks into a physics lab and is told "you don't belong here" is walking through a door Katharine Burr Blodgett already opened.
She was 18 years old when she became the first woman hired at General Electric's research laboratory in a building full of men who didn't think women could do physics.
She invented technology that changed how humanity sees the world.
And for decades, history couldn't see her.
But now we do.
Now we remember that every barrier broken makes the next one easier to break.
That every woman told "you don't belong" who succeeds anyway creates possibility for the next generation.
Katharine Burr Blodgett made glass invisible.
History tried to make her invisible too.
We're bringing her back into focus.

11/15/2025

When a dying legend walked onto the Oscar stage, an entire audience rose to their feet and wouldn't stop clapping—what happened next brought Hollywood to tears.
It was April 9, 1979, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Behind the curtain stood John Wayne, battling stomach cancer diagnosed just three months earlier. His doctors advised against appearing. His family worried. But when the Academy asked him to present the Best Picture Oscar, Wayne gave them the answer he'd given Hollywood for 50 years: "I'll be there."
As the Duke stepped into the spotlight, something extraordinary happened. The audience erupted. Not polite applause—a thunderous standing ovation that rolled through the auditorium in waves. Seconds turned into minutes. Hardened directors wiped their eyes. Fellow actors who'd shared the screen with him stood frozen in respect. Wayne, visibly frail but still towering in his black tuxedo, stood there absorbing the love of an industry saying goodbye.
When the applause finally subsided, his voice—that unmistakable voice that had commanded cavalry charges and faced down outlaws in over 170 films—filled the hall one last time. "That's just about the only medicine a fellow'd ever really need," he said, his eyes glistening. "Believe me when I tell you that I'm mighty pleased that I can amble down here tonight."
He opened the envelope with steady hands and announced The Deer Hunter as the winner. As he exited the stage to another standing ovation, no one in that room knew they had just witnessed the final curtain call of an American icon.
Two months later, on June 11, 1979, John Wayne passed away at age 72. But that night at the Oscars? That night belonged to the ages—a moment when Hollywood paused to honor not just an actor, but a piece of their own history. A man who taught us that true courage isn't the absence of fear, it's showing up even when you're afraid. Even when you're tired. Even when it's your last ride.
The Duke tipped his hat to us one final time. And we'll never forget it.

Alyssa Jane

11/19/2025

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