WHEN DUNDALK GUY MET ‘THE DUKE’

<::photo::> Bill Atkins shares his commercial real estate agency office in Bowie with
“The Duke,” in this screen capture from a DVD interview Atkins did with John Wayne
impersonator Jake Thorne.
St. Helena native was an extra in Wayne film

by Bill Gates

Marine Corps sergeant Bill Atkins arrived at California’s Camp Pendleton in September
1950 expecting to be sent to fight in the Korean War.

Instead, he was recruited to help John Wayne re-enact the War in the Pacific.

Atkins, a former St. Helena resident who now lives in Bowie, was one of several
Marines who appeared as extras in the 1951 movie Flying Leathenecks.

The film, which also featured Robert Ryan (Bad Day at Black Rock, The Dirty Dozen,
The Wild Bunch) and was directed by Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause), was about a
Marine fighter squad-ron during the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1941.

Atkins and about 11 other Marines were in their Camp Pendleton barracks, waiting for
deployment orders, when they received their new assignment.

“They came in and asked for the highest-ranking non-com, which happened to be me,”
said Atkins, 76. “We hopped into a jeep, and I was told a movie was being filmed on
an abandoned airfield and until further notice we were going to be assigned to that
movie.  Seven days a week, 12 hours a day, with no other duties.”

Atkins never did make it to Korea.  By the time filming was complete, he had less
than a year remaining in his enlistment.

“The policy was, if you had less than year left, you didn’t go to Korea,” said
Atkins, who had enlisted in 1948 after graduating from Patterson High School.

One hundred men from Atkins’ unit, the 11th Engineer Battalion, fought in Korea.
Fifteen were killed in action.

“No doubt about it, the movie might have saved my life,” Atkins said.  “One of my
closest friends was wounded in Korea.”

After his discharge in 1952, Atkins briefly returned to St. Helena before getting a
job in Washington, D.C.

Bill Atkins points to photos showing himself with John Wayne during the filming of
the 1951 film Flying Leathernecks.  Atkins, who was in the Marines at the time, was
an extra in the film.  This photo is a screen capture from an interview with Atkins
conducted and filmed by Jake Thorne, a John Wayne impersonator from Bowie.

While growing up in Dundalk, Atkins played in the St. Timothy’s Lutheran Church Drum
and Bugle Corps.  The unit performed in the 4th of July Parade, the Apple Blossom
Festival in Winchester, Va., and competitions in Baltimore.

Atkins now owns a commercial real estate agency in Bowie and has turned his office
into a small museum of John Wayne memorabilia.

Wayne, who died of lung and stomach cancer in June 1979, was born 100 years ago last
month.

“We were real excited,” Atkins said of him and his fellow Marines when they found out
they would be in a movie with the iconic Wayne, a top box-office attraction best
known for decades of portraying tough guys.  “The next day, we went back to the PX
and all bought cameras.  For the next three, four days, all day long, we were
snapping photos of John Wayne.”

The studio also took photographs of each of the Marines with Wayne and sent them to
their hometowns as a publicity move.

The excitement eventually wore off, Atkins said, but he and the other Marines took
“quite a few photos” the first week on the set.

They became known as the “Mud Marines” around camp, since they weren’t allowed to
shave or change their fatigues while the moving was filming.

Marines were expected to be well-groomed, so Atkins and his men were issued cards
saying they were assigned to RKO Productions and were not to shave until filming was
completed.

“That was the only way we could get off the base without being clean-shaven,” Atkins
said.

Atkins appears in several scenes during Flying Leathernecks: taking shelter during an
air raid, on the ground behind Wayne during another air raid, sitting next to a
.50-caliber machine gun and running out on the wing of a PBY seaplane to help put out
a fire.

Where he was most surprised to see himself, however, was on the movie poster that was
displayed in theater lobbies.

When Atkins first saw the poster in 1951, he asked the theater manager if he could
have it.

“He said no, it had to go back to the studio,” Atkins recalled. “Fifty years later, I
finally got the lobby card — I bought it off eBay.”

Wayne, said Atkins, was as big in real life (6-feet-4) as he looked onscreen.

“He was the only person I ever met [who], when he walked up, he was electrifying,”
Atkins said.  “Everyone stopped.  He had, I don’t know what it was, something about
his personality.  The way you see him, is what you get.”

Atkins’s office includes a couple of John Wayne cardboard standups, scrap-books,
magazines, and photos from the set of Flying Leathernecks, including several of a
much-younger Atkins with Wayne.

“Anything related to John Wayne, I have,” Atkins said.  “I took one room of my office
and made it into a miniature John Wayne museum.”

Collecting a Wayne stand-up from a local liquor store led Atkins to a friendship with
Jake Thorne, a John Wayne impersonator who also lives in Bowie.

Thorne filmed an interview with Atkins reminiscing about his days on the Flying
Leathernecks set, put it on a DVD and showed it during a John Wayne Cancer Foundation
event last year in Pennsylvania.

In 1949, Atkins had been part of the 11th Engineer Battalion band that performed
during the opening of another Wayne film, Sands of Iwo Jima, at the original
Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore.

The next year, he was working with the legendary star.

“It was the chance of a lifetime, but I didn’t realize it back then,” Atkins said.
“I thought it was no big deal. But how many people can say they not just met, but
were actually around John Wayne for five, six weeks, seven days a week?  The older I
get, the more I realize it was a big deal.”