Thanksgiving : A Gift of Holiday Recollections : Dinner With Duke Led to Marriage

They had survived their first raw winter in the new land--a harrowing time of scarce food, hard work and sickness that killed nearly half of the tiny band of 102 Pilgrims who had settled in Plymouth, Mass.

And so they gathered in the autumn of 1621, having been befriended by their Indian neighbors and blessed by a bountiful harvest, to rejoice and give thanks, as was their custom, with a harvest festival.

Three-hundred sixty-four years later, the spirit of that first New England Thanksgiving lives on.

It’s a theme with few variations: An annual reunion of family and friends, a festive occasion permeated with the tastes and smells of good things to eat.

But, as years go by, it is the memories of past Thanksgivings and the people we shared them with that help give special meaning to the annual rite of fall.

To find out what significance the national holiday has played in their lives, prominent Orange County residents were asked to share their thoughts on Thanksgivings past and present.

Unlike past Thanksgivings, Pilar Wayne will not be cooking Thanksgiving dinner for her three children and two grandchildren at her home in Newport Beach.

Wayne and her daughter Marisa, 19, have been invited to play in the Bernie Kopell Celebrity Tennis Tournament that begins today in Palm Springs, and they will be eating with their fellow tennis players at a Thanksgiving dinner hosted by the Kopells.

“My oldest daughter (Aissa) won’t be in the tournament, but she will have dinner with us,” Wayne said. “My son (Ethan) happens to be in Manila right now making a movie, so he won’t be with me. Normally, Thanksgiving and Christmas is always here at home.”

And Wayne, who has written one cookbook and is writing two more, always does the cooking: “turkey with all the trimmings.”

“I love to cook,” she said. “If I have an hour or two hours free, I like to get into the kitchen and experiment.”

Wayne, a former movie star in her native Peru, has no trouble recalling her most memorable Thanksgiving.

“My most memorable was probably when I came to Los Angeles in 1953 to dub a movie I made in South America from Spanish to English,” she recalled. “I met Duke about three days before Thanksgiving, so he asked me to Thanksgiving dinner.

“We had dinner together, just the two of us, at a restaurant in the (San Fernando) Valley. I’ll never forget the name of it because our boat was named the same thing. It was called the Wild Goose.”

They were married the next year, and throughout their years together, Wayne said, Thanksgiving was always a big family celebration.

“They were always family dinners,” she said. “He (John Wayne) had four grown-up children, so usually we had them over. He was such a wonderful family man. Always, Thanksgiving and Christmas meant a lot to him.”

More than just getting the family together and “giving thanks for what you have,” Wayne said that Thanksgiving for her “means that you have to wish for peace and just hope that the world turns out to be a better place for everybody.”