I was very fortunate to grow up in a household of role models. My father, mother, and brother all worked hard, and I don’t remember any nasty comments about other people ever expressed in our house. That doesn’t mean they loved everyone, but they were never nasty or hostile. I’m sure that’s why today I’m good at cutting slack for others, as I hope they’ll do for me.
When I was in eighth grade in 1948, I was the seventh man on my grammar school basketball team. I loved playing basketball. As years went by, I was in a league at the Y with some of my teammates from grammar school. A fellow named Bill Goren who worked at the Y and was a friend of my family observed me playing. He called me into his office one day and said, “The other boys seem to be developing their skills more than you.” I said, “I know.” He asked, “Why is that?” I said, “I don’t know.”
I thought about it in later years and came to the conclusion that basketball for me was always just fun. If you really wanted to excel, you had to go full out to beat the other guy, something I really wasn’t interested in doing.
About twenty years later when I was in a pickup basketball game with other men, playing in my usual have-fun style, I remembered the conclusion I’d come to about excelling at basketball. In the middle of the game I thought to myself, If all you need to do is really put out much more effort to excel, why don’t you do it right now and find out if you’re kidding yourself? Though it might sound self-serving, I have to say that the minute I went full out, I dominated the game. In competitive sports, if you’re not ready to give everything you have every moment, don’t even bother showing up. Of course, that largely applies to life itself.
When I was a kid we had radio and movies. Movies were like a magic world, but radio was right there in our house, a member of the family. I think that’s why being on the radio these past several years has meant more to me than being in the movies or on television.
I remember a big red portable radio I often used to take to bed and put under the covers. Since my brother was six years older and usually went to bed later, I could listen to it until he came to bed and said nicely, “Could you turn your radio off?”
Looking back, I think I formed a lot of my values from the radio. I found a lot of heroes there—Superman, Batman, but mostly the Lone Ranger. There was something about the way he would ride off before anyone had a chance to thank him, and there’d always be one person who’d say, “Who was that masked man?” I got a particular thrill when the answer would come, “Why, that was the Lone Ranger!”
Several years ago there was quite a to-do in the news about the Lone Ranger. Some Hollywood producers were planning a new movie about him and were searching for someone to play him. During my childhood, the Lone Ranger was played by Brace Beemer on the radio. When the Lone Ranger moved to television, I was among the legions of fans who continued to follow him.
For us, there was only one Lone Ranger on television, and his name was Clayton Moore. Even as we grew older, he was still there. But now Hollywood wanted to make a big movie of the Lone Ranger, and Clayton Moore was seventy. Oh, he was still around. In fact, he was still around as the Lone Ranger. Nobody had seen him leap up on many horses lately, but he was still showing up at parades and rodeos, and getting plenty of cheers and applause, too.
But Hollywood was making a big new Lone Ranger movie, and the search was on for the new, young Lone Ranger. The producers of the movie felt it would not be in their interest to have two Lone Rangers around, so they went to court to get a ruling to force Clayton Moore to take off his mask and stop appearing as the Lone Ranger, and they won. Our Lone Ranger was ordered to take off his mask.
Clayton Moore had worn his mask his whole life. Without it, well, he just wasn’t the Lone Ranger. If you’ve been the Lone Ranger your whole life, it’s kind of tough, at seventy, to take off your mask and stop being him. So Clayton Moore went to court and protested the ruling, but he lost. Our Lone Ranger had to take off his mask.
Years earlier there was a headline in a New York newspaper. It read: SUPERMAN COMMITS SUICIDE. George Reeves, who had been Superman about as long as Clayton Moore had been the Lone Ranger, had committed suicide, having become despondent over being unable to find work as an actor after the Superman television series was canceled. Whenever he would try to get a part in something, they would say, “We can’t use you in that part. People will say, ‘That’s Superman!’” And so he couldn’t get a job, got very depressed, and ended his life.
Our Lone Ranger, Clayton Moore, fought back. When the court ordered him to take off his mask, he appealed the decision to a higher court. The next time anyone saw him in public, he had taken off the mask pending appeal, but in its place was a very large pair of dark sunglasses, not a bad mask in its own right. He showed up with those big dark sunglasses that covered just as much of his face as the mask had, and the applause and cheers were louder than ever. The public was on his side.
Meanwhile, the Hollywood producers found a young man named Klinton Spilsbury to be the new Lone Ranger. The movie was made. It came out, and nobody went to see it. There were at least a couple of reasons for this. It hadn’t gotten good reviews, and also, by the time it came out, there was quite a lot of public resentment over taking the mask off our Lone Ranger.
Eventually, a higher court ruled that Clayton Moore could wear the mask, after all. The glasses came off, the mask went back on, and Clayton Moore was getting bigger cheers than ever before!
Shortly after this I was at a party and got into a conversation with a young actor who turned out to be Klinton Spilsbury, the new movie’s Lone Ranger. He told me that he was a serious actor from New York, had studied a lot, and was really doing very well moving up the ladder when this Lone Ranger opportunity came along. He said the movie was a mess. There were several scripts, and no one could agree on whether they were supposed to be funny or serious. He was having difficulty finding work because of his association with the movie and had moved back to New York to try to pick up the pieces of his career, which basically had ended. The movie had a devastating effect on everyone except Clayton Moore, who was more popular than ever.
When I was a kid, we had a saying, “Don’t mess with the Lone Ranger.”
As the story went, when a troop of rangers were killed by the Indians, only one ranger survived, and he was nursed back to health by an Indian, Tonto. When the ranger first regained consciousness he asked the Indian, “What happened?” Tonto said, “All rangers killed. You Lone Ranger.” I got goose bumps.
Who among us has not sometimes felt like the lone ranger? Not the Lone Ranger, but the lone ranger?