Okay, we’re going to get this fact out of the way right now, because I’ve been kind of repetitive about pointing it out ever since I discovered it. Namely, Woody Strode is buried in the same cemetery as my dad, the Riverside National Cemetery in Riverside, California. I didn’t find this out until after the last trip I took down there, and anyway I doubt Mom (with whom I went) was all-fired excited about wandering over the flat and featureless grass in search of an actor’s grave, even though she’s a big fan of John Wayne and doubtless remembers Strode as Pompey from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. But, you know, if you’re ever at that cemetery, you can take a moment to pay your respects to a great and undervalued movie actor. Also my dad.

Woodrow Wilson Woolwine Strode was born in Los Angeles in 1914. He said he didn’t really experience racism growing up, and it was a shock to discover it upon leaving LA. It would have been interesting to ask his former UCLA football teammate Jackie Robinson, from Pasadena (he went to the same high school as my dad, actually, though considerably earlier), if he had the same experience. At any rate, Strode went to college, and it looked as though a pro ball career was in his future, until he quit to join the Army Air Corps during World War II. He played some pro ball after the war, did some pro wrestling. And he acted. Oh, he acted.

I mean, he also served as John Ford’s “black friend,” used against any accusations of racism. They were friends, and that advanced Strode’s career and was awfully good for Ford. While Ford was dying, Strode slept on his floor and served as his caretaker, and that’s awesome for anyone to do for a friend. Though you wonder why Ford didn’t maybe have a couch, but anyway. Get the man a cot. Still, Ford cast him in movies because of that friendship, and while that was definitely good for Strode, it was also good for all of us, because the roles Ford gave him tended to be better than most of the roles available for black men in the ’50s.

It’s more than a little disheartening to see how many of his roles involved playing an African of some sort; the man did a lot of Tarzan over the years, and Johnny Weismuller’s other series Jungle Jim. Ramar of the Jungle. He played a weird number of Native Americans, including an Arapaho chief on the TV show of How the West Was Won. A Moor, once. And, okay, he played kings of Ethiopia and Numidia, not to mention cops and soldiers and just plain guys. But king of Ethiopia is not completely better than “tribal policeman,” his first film role, not for a guy from LA.

But he was Pompey. He was Draba, who died rather than kill Spartacus. He was Sergeant Rutledge, in his own favourite of his movies. And apparently those are not the only ways he’ll be remembered. There are two tributes to him that I was unaware of. Many of the bodies of audio animatronic figures at Disneyland—the natives on the Jungle Boat Cruise and various of the Native Americans in Frontierland—are based on his. And from Pixar? Yes. Sheriff Woody is named for Woody Strode.