This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

To subscribe to our podcasts, go to the I-Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast.

And up next, another Hollywood Goes to War story with Roger McGrath.

McGrath is the author of Gunfighters, Highwayman, and Vigilantees,

Violence on the Frontier,

a U.S. Marine and former history professor at UCLA,

Dr. McGrath has appeared on numerous History Channel documentaries.

He's a regular contributor for us here at Our American Stories.

Here's McGrath. John Ford was arguably Hollywood's greatest director.

When the brilliant Orson Wells was asked to name his three favorite directors, he replied,

The Old Masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.

John Ford directed 140 movies and documentaries.

He won the Academy Award for Best Director, a record four times.

Nine of his movies were nominated for Best Picture, and one of them won it.

Two of his documentaries won Best Documentary, and he won Best Director of a Documentary for one of them.

John Martin Feeney is born in 1894 in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, a small town near Portland.

His father is John Augustin Feeney, a large and powerful man known for his feats of strength and spell-binding storytelling, who had immigrated to America from Spittle, a small town on the coast of Galway Bay in Ireland.

His mother is a former Barbara Curran, also an Irish immigrant, who had come from the town of

Kilronan on Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands, which lie at the entrance to Galway

Bay. For both John and Barbara, their first language is Gaelic. The young John Feeney, the future

John Ford, is called Johnny by his family.

...