Trendle didn’t like the restrictions that came with being a network station, so within a year he left CBS and became independent. That meant producing his own radio shows, but in those first few years WXYZ had trouble coming up with anything that could compete with popular shows on CBS and NBC.
Trendle never lost money showing cowboy movies in his theaters, so in December 1932 he fired off a letter to Fran Striker, a prolific scriptwriter:
Will you please write up three or four
Wild West thrillers, including all the
hokum of masked rider, rustler, killer
Pete, heroine on the train tracks, fight
on top of the boxcars, Indian bad men,
two-gun bank robbers, etc.
SEEING IS BELIEVING
That was a lot of detail to cram into a couple of scripts (especially when Trendle was only paying $4 per script) so Striker reworked some old episodes of a show called Covered Wagon Days to include a cowboy who wears a mask. Striker made him a Texas Ranger who traveled and worked alone—a lone ranger.
Striker gave his masked man ivory-handled revolvers, bullets made of silver, and a white stallion named Silver as well. Vivid details like these were known in the radio business as “shiny things for the mind,” and were considered essential because they enabled listeners to form sharp mental images of characters they could not see.
Old World monkeys have 32 teeth. New World monkeys: 36.
Because The Lone Ranger was going to be a children’s show, it was important that the character be a strong role model for kids. The Lone Ranger would treat others with respect. Violence would be kept to a minimum: He would use his guns only as a last resort and only to disarm his opponents, not to deliberately harm or kill them. He wouldn’t drink or smoke, and he would have no romances. George Trendle was a stickler for proper language, and in all his years on the air the Lone Ranger never used slang or poor grammar. He didn’t even have a Texas accent. He also never removed his mask, except to don another disguise. (The one exception: When meeting President Ulysses S. Grant, who refused to talk to a masked man.)
EASY RIDER
The country was mired in the Great Depression in the early 1930s and Trendle, a penny-pincher in the best of times, was determined to cut costs wherever he could. The show needed a theme song, but Trendle didn’t want to pay royalties to a composer. So he chose a classical selection: the finale to the William Tell Overture by Gioachino Rossini, who was long dead. That piece of music has been synonymous with The Lone Ranger ever since. The show aired for the first time on Monday, January 30, 1933, at 8:00 p.m. and was broadcast three times a week for the next 22 years—2,956 original episodes in all.
Because of the limitations of radio, the Lone Ranger wouldn’t remain alone for long. In radio the storyline advances largely through dialogue—or in the case of the first ten episodes of The Lone Ranger, through monologues. When the Lone Ranger was with other characters, he could talk to them, but when he was riding Silver, he rode alone. To prevent listeners from getting bored with one scene after another of the Lone Ranger talking to himself, Striker created the a “faithful Indian companion, Tonto,” and introduced him in episode 11.
ME TONTO
In recent decades the pidgin-talking Tonto has come to be seen as a demeaning, stereotypical depiction of Native Americans and their culture. The Lone Ranger told Tonto what to do, never vice versa. The Lone Ranger spoke perfect English, while Tonto sounded more like Tarzan. Considering all of the character’s flaws, it’s easy to forget just how ahead of its time, Tonto was for the early 1930s. The Lone Ranger’s audience soon grew to nearly 250 stations all over the United States, including in the Jim Crow South, where racial segregation was the law of the land. There, as everywhere, children were being entertained by a white man whose sole trusted companion and kemosabe—“faithful friend”—was an Indian that he respected as an equal. The Lone Ranger would, in effect, slip its subtle message of racial tolerance, right past segregationist parents and into the hearts and minds of their children.
500,000 Twitter followers equals one “Wheaton” (after Star Trek’s Wil Wheaton).
MAIL CALL
It didn’t take long for Trendle and Striker to sense that they had a hit show on their hands, but just how big was it? In those days measuring the size of a radio show’s audience wasn’t easy. One way to do it was to offer a free premium to listeners and invite them to write in to get it. If the station received a lot of letters, they would know the show had a large audience.
A few months after The Lone Ranger hit the airwaves, WXYZ offered kids a free Lone Ranger pop gun. The station received 25,000 letters in three days. That July, when the Lone Ranger made a public appearance at a local park, more than 70,000 people turned out to see him. The show was on its way to becoming one of the most popular in the history of radio, enjoyed by nearly as many adult listeners as children. Kids everywhere—girls included—dressed in Lone Ranger and Tonto outfits, joined Lone Ranger safety clubs, played with Lone Ranger cap guns, and sent away for one premium after another, including badges, silver bullets, and the Lone Ranger six-shooter ring, which shot real sparks when “fired” by spinning a flint wheel.
KEEPING UP APPEARANCES
The first person to play the Lone Ranger was George Seaton who left the show after three months. He was replaced by a radio actor named Earl Graser, who signed on in April 1933. Graser sounded like the Lone Ranger, but didn’t look like him at all. He was short and fat, he couldn’t ride a horse, and he didn’t like guns, either—not exactly the kind of guy you’d want to send out on public appearances. So WXYZ gave that part of the job to the show’s announcer, 6'3″ Brace Beemer, a skilled rider who looked great on a horse and was good with guns. When Earl Graser died in a car accident in 1941—“LONE RANGER DEAD; AUTO HIT TRAILER,” read the headline in The New York Times—Beemer took over the voice job as well. He played the Lone Ranger for the rest of the radio show’s run.
Traditional cure-all in China: “Wine” made from baby mice drowned in rice liquor.
AS SEEN ON TV
But the actor who would become most closely associated with the Lone Ranger in the pubic mind was former circus acrobat Clayton Moore. Moore played the Lone Ranger on TV from 1949 to 1952, and, after sitting out a season over a pay dispute, again from 1953 to the show’s end in 1957. Playing Tonto on the TV show was a Canadian Mohawk actor named Jay Silverheels. (Real name: Harold J. Smith. He got the nickname “Silverheels” years earlier, from his teammates on Canada’s national lacrosse team, who were impressed with his speed and shiny athletic shoes).
The Lone Ranger was the first Western produced for television and ABC TV’s first big hit. But Moore isn’t the best-remembered Lone Ranger just because he played the character on TV. After the show ended in 1957, he continued to make personal appearances as the Lone Ranger for the next 40 years. And in all that time he never made a public appearance without wearing a mask…at least not until 1979. That’s when the producers of the upcoming film The Legend of the Lone Ranger went to court to force him to give up the mask, out of fear that he would confuse movie goers into thinking that he, not the much younger actor they’d hired, was starring in the upcoming film.
Big mistake: Moore gave up the mask, only to switch to oversized sunglasses that looked like a mask, and then gave one TV interview after another generating terrible publicity for the film. All those kids who grew up watching Clayton Moore as their Lone Ranger boycotted what might have been a sure moneymaker. Result: The film lost $11 million, and Actor Klinton Spilsbury, who played the Lone Ranger, never worked in Hollywood again.
MISSING PERSONS
So how is it that a show that was so beloved for so long has been absent save for occasional TV reruns ever since? The fact that The Legend of the Lone Ranger bombed at the box office in 1981 certainly didn’t help, but much of the trouble rests with Tonto. The character has not aged well. Even Jay Silverheels, who was popular in the role during the TV show’s original run,
came to be derided in later years as an “Uncle Tomahawk” for perpetuating negative Indian stereotypes.
Check it yourself: The bottom row of a QWERTY keyboard has no vowels.
When the 2013 Disney film The Lone Ranger was in the early stages of production in 2002, there was talk of tackling the issue by casting a woman as Tonto. Later it was decided that Tonto would be the lead character in the film, and Johnny Depp was cast in the role, with an actor named Armie Hammer playing the Lone Ranger. If the big-screen reboots of Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man are any guide, this latest film won’t be the last time that the story is freshened up and presented to a new generation of fans.
“The Lone Ranger will never die,” Clayton Moore told an interviewer not long before his death in 1999. “It’s Americana: the cowboy, the cattle drive, the sheriff, the fight for law, order and justice—it’s part of our history, and what that stands for can never be extinguished.”
* * *
SO THAT’S WHY HE WEARS IT
For the first five years that The Lone Ranger was on the radio, the series made no attempt to explain his true identity, or why he wore his mask. It wasn’t until the first movie serial, produced by Republic Pictures in 1938, that fans finally learned who their hero was. According to the script, six Texas Rangers were ambushed by outlaws as they rode through a canyon. The only survivor, named John Reid, was found and nursed back to health by Tonto, an Indian whose life Reid had saved when they were younger. (“You only ranger left,” Tonto tells Reid after the attack. “You Lone Ranger.”) Reid’s older brother Dan was one of the rangers killed in the ambush. Reid makes a mask out of fabric taken from his dead brother’s vest and wears it to prevent the outlaws from realizing he is still alive. Then he and Tonto set out to bring the murderers to justice. The origin story was so popular that it was adopted by the radio show and subsequent films as well.
Highest recorded temperature in Alaska: 100°F. Highest in Hawaii: 100°F.
Q&A:
ASK THE EXPERTS
More questions, with answers from the world’s top trivia experts.
SEEMS FISHY
Q: Who do pizzerias offer anchovies, if nobody orders them?
A: “When the dish was first developed, in Naples during the late 18th century, anchovies made an ideal topping—they were cheap, plentiful, and could be preserved almost indefinitely in oil and salt. When the first wave of Italian immigrants came to the U.S. in the late 1800s, they brought pizza with them. In the 1910s, as Anglo-Americans began to sample the exotic food, pizzerias started catering to local tastes, offering toppings like vegetables and pork, which crowded out the anchovy. Today it seems that pizzerias persist in offering them more out of nostalgia.” (From The Explainer, by the editors of Slate)
BUTTERFLIES FLUTTER BY
Q: What’s the difference between a moth and a butterfly?
A: “Though many people distinguish them by color (butterflies are often the more brightly colored), other features are better for telling them apart. Butterflies have slim bodies and moths have stout ones. The antennae on a butterfly are long, slender, and tipped with knobs, while those of moths are hairlike or feathery. Most moths fly at night; butterflies are active during the day.” (From Reader’s Digest’s ABCs of Nature: A Family Answer Book)
PRUNE POWER
Q: Why are prunes such a powerful laxative?
A: “Prunes (or dried plums) are primarily famous for being a laxative because they are rich in fiber. Also, a prune contains more than one gram of sorbitol (a carbohydrate our bodies do not absorb well). Large amounts of sorbitol can cause diarrhea. Prunes also contain the laxative diphenylisatin.” (From DiscoveryHealth.com)
It took author J. R. R. Tolkien 12 years to write the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
WHEN TOILETS EXPLODE
More terrifying tales of good thrones gone bad.
Victims: Employees and visitors to the King County Courthouse in Seattle
Boom! One morning in February 1989, the courthouse’s toilets and urinals began erupting violently when anyone tried to flush them. “They started blowing at about 11:30 a.m. We think we’ve lost about twenty to twenty-five toilets. The porcelain is actually cracked,” said building manager Bill Kemp. The problem was traced to work on a $430 million bus-tunnel project nearby, where someone had mistakenly connected an air compressor to a water line, causing the line to fill with more pressure than it was designed to handle. No one was injured, but several people were soaked by water from the exploding toilets.
Victim: Edmond Okolie of Seattle
Boom! What is it with Seattle public works projects? In November 2006, Okolie was inspecting a leaky toilet in the basement of an adult-care facility when it erupted with so much force that the toilet was blown off the floor, striking Okolie and knocking him to the ground. Raw sewage continued to gush from the hole in the floor until the entire basement was flooded. Okolie, bruised and drenched in sewage but otherwise unharmed, scrambled upstairs to safety. Investigators traced the problem to a nearby light-rail construction project, where workers had accidentally cut into or blocked the sewer line, causing pressure to build up in the line until it exploded. At last report Okolie was suing the transit line for unspecified damages.
Victims: Undergraduate students living in the University of Chicago’s Pierce Tower dormitory
Boom! During the fall and winter of 2011–12, the 50-year-old dormitory had severe problems with its antiquated plumbing: leaking urinals, broken drains, showers, and erupting toilets that sounded like shotgun blasts and sprayed their contents onto bathroom ceilings. “In one twenty-four-hour period,” a student complained on a web log set up to document Pierce Hall’s problems, “the plumbing exploded twice, and exploded with such force and severity that a toilet bowl shattered, throwing porcelain shards across the bathroom. There were, on the floor, just rivers of excrement, urine and pieces of porcelain. And there were no e-mails from the university about the issue.” The toilet blasts were usually accompanied by water outages that lasted many hours. One female student who was drenched with the contents of a toilet had to clean up with Clorox wipes because the water was out. It took months for the university to tackle the problem, but luckily when they finally did, spring break was just around the corner. While the students were away, the university overhauled the 10-story building’s plumbing, replacing the faulty equipment that caused the toilet explosions and installing video displays next to the elevators on each floor, to warn students quickly if the problems return. (So far, they haven’t.)
Actual product: “Cheeseburger in a Can,” made by a Swedish company called Trek’n Eat.
Victim: Dennis Bueller, a 14-year-old boy in Recklinghausen, Germany
Boom! In November 2008, Bueller used the bathroom and then reached for a can of air freshener. “I sprayed because it smelled, then I began fiddling with a cigarette lighter,” he told London’s Daily Mail. Big mistake: The lighter ignited the air freshener, causing a blast powerful enough to send Bueller flying out an open window. “There was this big orange whoosh of flame. I woke up outside with my clothes burned off and me smelling like a barbecue,” he said. Bueller was hospitalized with burns to his upper body, but was expected to recover. “I think he realizes he was a bit dim in playing with a lighter,” his father told reporters.
* * *
SIGN LANGUAGE
Over a trash can in Beijing: “Please don’t throw rubbish away”
In Budapest, Hungary: “Tourists! Don’t follow your guides!”
On a beach in Mexico: “Dangerous not to swim.”
On a road in Jeju Island, South Korea: “Wayout Parking.”
On a cafe storefront in Seoul, South Korea: “Hussy Coffee”
Inside Afghanistan’s Kabul Museum: “Please Do Not Use the Flashy Cameras During the Photography”
The phrase “Don’t Mess with Texas” was coined in 1985 as an anti-litter slogan.
NOT-MURDER MYSTERIES
When murder most foul t
urns out to be…not murder at all.
Victim: Todd Sommer of San Diego, California
Details: In 2002 Sommer, a 23-year-old Marine, died suddenly while on leave at his San Diego home. An autopsy found the cause of death to be a heart attack.
Murder! In 2005 more than three years later, Sommer’s wife, Cynthia, was arrested for his murder. Marine investigators had reviewed the case and found that the arsenic levels in Todd Sommer’s liver were more than a thousand times higher than normal. This could only have occurred via poisoning, they said. At the trial, jurors were told that Cynthia received $250,000 in veteran’s benefits after her husband’s death, and that within just a few months, she had used some of that money on breast implants and had been “sexually promiscuous.” Based on that circumstantial evidence, in 2007 Cynthia Sommer was found guilty of murder. She faced life in prison with no possibility of parole.
…or Not: Sommer appealed the case and won a retrial. But before the second trial even began, prosecutors dropped the case. They’d redone Todd Sommer’s lab tests, and the new results showed no sign of arsenic whatsoever. (The first lab had somehow contaminated the samples, they said.) Because the rest of the case was little more than character assassination, Cynthia Sommer was released, with all charges dropped. By that time, she’d spent more than two years in prison. Sommer filed a $20 million wrongful conviction lawsuit against the San Diego prosecutor’s office in 2009.
Victims: Seven people in The Hague, Netherlands
Details: In September 2001, a six-month-old infant died at the Juliana Children’s Hospital in The Hague. The death was deemed suspicious, prompting an investigation. Result: High levels of digoxin were found in the baby’s blood. Digoxin is a medication used to treat heart conditions (for which the child was being treated), but it can be deadly when used improperly.
Uncle John's Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (Uncle John's Bathroom Reader) Page 58