Portland's Tribute to John Ford: A Conversation with Jack Dawson. Hosted by Michael Connolly.

In 1998, the impressive statue of world-renown film director, John Ford (1894-1973), was unveiled in Portland, Maine. Sitting cross-legged in a director’s chair, in the Gorham’s Corner section of Portland’s West End, you’ll find the statue complete with sacred earth from his beloved Monument Valley.
This tribute to Portland’s film poet, John Ford, is the perfect complement to the statue in Longfellow Square of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, also a Portland native, who was a literary poet in the truest sense of the word.
Arguably the most influential director of all time, John Ford grew up as Jack Feeney, one of many children in a large Irish immigrant family. His brother Frank (Francis Ford), famous in his own right for acting and directing in the silent film era, made it to California before him and eventually introduced his little brother to the trade. In Hollywood, John quickly fell in love with filmmaking. Like his brother, he changed his name to Ford and released his first film as a director in 1917, at the age of 23. Ford would go on to direct over 150 films, mostly Westerns, including Stagecoach, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Grapes of Wrath. Throughout his career, he won six Academy Awards; four of them for directing, a record which still stands today.
In this interview, hosted by Michael Connolly, former Portland Mayor, Jack Dawson recalls the dramatic events surrounding the commissioning and creation of the statue.
The campaign to pay tribute to John Ford began in the mid-1990s. Linda Noe Laine, whose father, a former Governor of Louisiana, who was friends with Ford, visited the Old Port and was surprised to find no tribute to Ford. Laine donated funds and worked with Dawson to find a place for the statue she commissioned from New York sculptor George Kelly. Together, they settled on a place of honor at the corner of York, Pleasant, and Center Streets in the heart of the former Irish immigrant neighborhood known as Gorham’s Corner.