John Wayne Found A Boy Saving $19 For His Father's Headstone In 1956 — Then He Bought The Stone

October 1956. A little diner called Earl's, alone on Route 66 west of Seligman, Arizona. Earl Wills built it with his own hands and dropped dead at his own grill fourteen months ago — and his nine-year-old son Danny is up before dawn every morning opening the front, busing tables on a milk crate, doing a grown man's work without a word of complaint. He's been saving every nickel of his tips in a coffee can for over a year. When a tall man in a tan Stetson stops in for breakfast and asks the boy what he's saving for — a bike? a ball glove? — Danny takes a folded catalog page out of his overalls. It's a sixty-dollar granite headstone. His father is buried under a wooden cross, and a man ought to have his name on something that lasts. Three days later a truck pulls up at Earl's with the stone, already cut and lettered — and the man who paid for it wouldn't leave his name.