The Early Radio Adventures of "THE LONE RANGER"

Just as "Nitrate won't wait" became the rallying cry for film archivists, "Acetate won't wait" has become the mantra for collectors of old-time radio. Widely used for three decades (1930s through the 1950s), then slowly replaced with magnetic tape and other formats, radio broadcasts featuring comedy, music and drama were preserved for both commercial and historical purposes. Fans of old-time radio programs, and fans of The Lone Ranger in general, are fully aware of the 2,600 radio broadcasts from 1938 to 1954 that were preserved thanks to this format. Over 2,000 of those radio episodes have been released commercially thanks to companies like Radio Spirits, which commercially releases CD sets periodically through the months through licensing agreements.

The Lone Ranger was not recorded on a regular basis until February of 1938. Prior, the program aired live over the Michigan Radio Network, the Don Lee Network, and the Mutual Broadcasting System. Therefore, Lone Ranger radio broadcasts prior to February 1938 should not be considered “lost” because they were never recorded in the first place. Thankfully, almost every radio script exists from the series so we have an opportunity to fill the gaps with plot summaries. 

 

It was not until early 1938 that The Lone Ranger radio program was recorded on a regular basis. Prior, the radio broadcasts originating from WXYZ in Detroit, Michigan, were never heard again after the initial broadcast. No sooner did the broadcast conclude, the actors tossed their scripts into a box in the corner of the room and began rehearsals for the next drama (usually The Green Hornet or Warner Lester, Manhunter). As a result, the first five years of the program does not exist in recorded form. Thankfully, we have the radio scripts to consult. Enclosed are plot summaries based on the script pages, "lost" adventures of the masked man and his faithful Indian companion, Tonto.

 

Episode #330, Broadcast March 11, 1935

Plot: Old Barney Bolt prospected for a decade in a spot that he called the Mary Jane Mine, named after his wife who supported him in the endeavors that might one day provide for the remainder of their years. While purchasing supplies at the general store owned by Lem Saunders, The Lone Ranger learns that Jason Parker fronted Barney money to further his quest for gold… the same Jason Parker who was sent to jail in Sanderson two months ago for a crooked swindle deal. The Lone Ranger breaks Parker from jail to see if the man was truly innocent of the scheme, only to discover he misjudged the crook. Though Parker lent $1,000 in return for the same plus interest when the mine pays out, Barney’s gold strike creates a complication. The contract requires paper money on demand – not gold – thus Parker can claim ownership of the mine. In the general store, within the presence of witnesses, The Lone Ranger assures Parker that his demand will be valid when he provides the signed note and the crook runs off to fetch the agreement. While the masked man holds everyone at bay in the store until Parker’s return, knowing it will take Barney three months for his strike to pay out in paper bills, Tonto surprises the four-flusher outside… with Sheriff Larson from Sanderson to take Parker back to finish his year-long sentence.

 

Episode #331, Broadcast March 13, 1935

Plot: Flint Bagley is a hard but honest man, opposed to the marriage of his daughter Caroline, and a young wheat farmer named Jim Brendell. Jim owes on a mortgage to Flint, and knows if the wheat is harvested and sold, Jim will have the funds to make good for Caroline. At the Three Star café, Flint offers Baldy, a farmer who also owes on a mortgage to Flint, a deal Baldy cannot turn down. If Baldy will burn Jim’s wheat so Jim cannot pay off his mortgage, Flint will consider Baldy’s mortgage paid in full. The Lone Ranger, overhearing the scheme, consults Baldy later that evening and proposes a scheme… One week passes and as Jim and Caroline gazed at the wheat field that promised the best harvest in three years, and spoke of their hopes for the future, Flint secretly delights in the lack of rain that allows the wheat to dry. Tonto, working for Baldy, has many Indians to help set multiple fires to ensure the burning of the fields cannot be extinguished. As far as the eye can see, there are small fires blazing increasing in fury with each moment. Jim is aghast at what he sees. Flint secretly hands Baldy his mortgage and Baldy tears it in pieces; he owes Flint nothing. The Lone Ranger gives Tonto the word and the Indian shouts to put out the fires. The wheat was hardly touched by the fire. Instead of setting the fires to the wheat, each Indian cut the wheat down for yards around from where they built a fire, ensuring the illusion. Flint, realizing he lost the game of sabotage, says it looks like Jim is aiming to marry Caroline and there comes a time when a man cannot buck things. Flint gives Caroline and Jim permission to marry. He says Jim owes him nothing on the mortgage. After all, they will need the wheat crop to start their new life together.

 

Notes: The name of Caroline’s mother changed from Jessie to Jennie in the script. It is not certain which name was used but is can be assumed that the oversight was caught during the rehearsals and adjusted accordingly.

 

Episode #332, Broadcast March 15, 1935

Copyright Registration #34,353, script received at Registration Office March 15, 1935.

Plot: In a camp near the Rio Grande River, the border of the United States and Mexico, are a number of Texas Rangers led by Captain Hawks. These men of sterling courage and keen intellect are hoping to capture the ruthless outlaw gang led by the half-breed named Lobo. Texas Ranger Grant, who knows Lobo well, thinks there is something wrong. The trail to the border is too easy to follow. At the border, Lobo will be trapped between two forces wanting to capture him, the Texas Rangers and the Mexican Army. The Lone Ranger disguises himself as Captain Hawks and creates a scenario whereupon he gets captured and taken to the island hideout across the river.

 

TONTO: This heap dangerous thing you do! You mebbe die!

 

RANGER: Danger Tonto? The man that is afraid to die, has not the right to live! I will come back Tonto…but… if anything should happen, Kemosabe, take care of Silver!

 

The disguised Lone Ranger finds himself bound tightly and Killer Gurkin gloats over the capture. When The Lone Ranger taunts him about his obedience to Lobo, Gurkin slugs the Ranger. Gurkin shows Lobo that his hand has color from the captive’s face; he has something spread on his face. Lobo starts to wipe the makeup off the unconscious face but never finishes his task. When Captain Hawks asks who is the man that stopped him, Tonto says he is Tonto’s fine friend! “Him mebbe not come back.” Hawks is observant: “My heaven! Can it be… see here… is that a tear in your eye?” Tonto straightens out: “No! Not baby! Not woman! Me Injun! Me Tonto!”

 

Tonto, on top of Silver, races to the rescue through fifty yards of shallow water. Silver’s mighty hoof stomps on Lobo, who is knocked down but not badly hurt. The Texas Rangers follow Tonto and begin making arrests. Before his identity can be exposed, The Lone Ranger leaps upon his mighty steed and rides away.

 

Episode #335, Broadcast March 22, 1935

Plot: Ben Barton is known as the richest and meanest man this side of the Mississippi River, having gained his wealth by crooked means. As a passenger on a stagecoach rolling toward Deadwood, a masked robber stops the stage and orders Barton to exit before sending the stage on its way. The stage, meanwhile, arrives in Deadwood and hearing the news of the kidnapping, The Lone Ranger and Tonto race out to find Barton’s dead body, a fired gun inscribed with Barton’s name, and tracks and blood leading away from the scene of the crime. Bob Sanders was the masked robber who accused Barton of killing his father, with intent on seeking revenge, and explains to his mother that Barton pulled a gun on him and he was forced to shoot in self-defense. The sheriff, however, entered into the records Bob as an outlaw, posting a reward dead or alive. Many days pass while Bob is hidden in a cave and cared for by The Lone Ranger and Tonto. After the Indian learns the sheriff has been cattle rustling, The Lone Ranger convinces Bob to sneak into the camp of Texas Rangers and steal two of their horses, with the assistance of Tonto. Pursued by the Rangers, they are guided by The Lone Ranger astride Silver to a narrow gap which leads to a valley, where the crooked sheriff and his outlaw partners are caught with possession of stolen horses. The Texas Rangers learn how the sheriff and Barton conspired together. The death of Barton and leading the law to the guilty culprit cleared the good name of Bob Sanders, and the governor appoints Bob as a Texas Ranger, like his father always hoped for.

 

 

NOTES: These plot summaries were reprinted from The Lone Ranger: The Early Years, 1933-1937, by Terry Salomonson and Martin Grams, Jr.

The LONE RANGER Fan Club

Did you know there is an official LONE RANGER fan club? I was among the first many years ago to sign up. With membership #10, I have my membership card and certificate framed and hanging on the wall with pride. Every three months I received a printed newsletter in the mail and the benefits from the club were enjoyable for fans of the masked vigilante.

Well, the club has a new president now who is presently revising the website to be more interactive, more rewarding, and even blog entries with brief articles and trivia. The newsletter is also going through a major rehaul with informative articles about the history of the radio and television series. Just last week I received a sneak peak at the next issue and I was greatly impressed. The newsletter, whether hardcopy or digital, will be worth the cost of membership.

For a limited time, membership is half price so now you have a major incentive to sign up and become a member. You can sign up within minutes on the website.

https://thelrfc.org

The Lone Ranger Little Golden Book

With so many Lone Ranger books produced for children, it comes as no surprise that no reference guide has yet to document them all. Thanks to today's digital age, we can acquire a copy in PDF format with the click of a button. For your entertainment, enclosed is a link for a Little Golden Book featuring the masked rider of the plains. This link will be active for only a few weeks so do not delay. Enjoy!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/04ap1ep5d1g0hff/The%20Lone%20Ranger%20book.pdf?dl=0

Boris Karloff and LIGHTS OUT: The 1938 Proposal

It was the spring of 1934. Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy had been on the radio waves for only eight months and the script writer, having completed over 100 scripts of the radio serial, was showing signs of wear. Executives at Blackett-Sample-Hummert, Inc., the advertising agency representing the sponsor, General Mills, was seeking a new script writer to take over the assignment. In May of 1934, Arch Oboler, then a resident of Chicago, Illinois, where the children’s radio program originated, was approached with an offer to take over the scriptwriting chores. 

Oboler listened to the program for a week, reviewed sample radio scripts, and provided a critique. Oboler claimed the Jack Armstrong program lacked the lighter, humorous touches that were so characteristic of high school activities and proposed (should he be accepted for the assignment) to introduce a new character to the program for comic relief: Sammy “Fat” Wells. Sammy would, as it turns out, become the best football player Hudson High ever had, despite the fact that Sammy was full of harmless pranks and bubbling with laughter. Oboler wrote a multi-page “General Synopsis of Future Story Development” and submitted it to the ad agency. The agency promptly declined. Oboler’s proposal was not off the tracks, but certainly not in the direction the producers (and the sponsor) were looking for. Oboler never wrote for Jack Armstrong.

Historical hypotheticals applied, this was perhaps for the best for Arch Oboler’s future would soon be cemented with a radio horror program called Lights Out. Had Oboler received the assignment from the agency, and wrote for the daily serial, he might not have ventured into the field of radio horrors… and Lights Out might have become a different program than we know it today.

Today, as fans of old-time radio often associate Oboler with the horror anthology, he has been erroneously cited as the creator of Lights Out. That duty should properly belong to Wyllis Cooper.

According to an article in the November 28, 1933, issue of Variety, Wyllis Cooper conceived the idea of “a midnight mystery serial to catch the attention of the listeners at the witching hour.” Radio station WENR, a Chicago affiliate of NBC, agreed to give Cooper a 15-minute time slot at midnight, while the competing radio stations were primarily focused on music. More fantasy and supernatural than mystery, Cooper’s tales generated a number of letters from radio listeners concerned about the spooky offerings. The network reviewed those letters and confirmed what they were curious to know: were people listening at such a late-night hour? Within four months the program expanded to a 30-minute time slot and the station sought sponsorship from a local business. After a year of terrifying late-night bedtime stories, and no sponsor having signed on the bottom line, the program was dropped in order to ease Cooper’s scriptwriting workload – especially since another of Cooper’s programs, Immortal Dramas, was sponsored by a major advertising company. The Lights Out program was brought back to the airwaves a few weeks later in spotted increments, including an unsuccessful tryout in New York City to take the program nationwide, and finally picked up nationally in April 1935 over NBC. Cooper remained the role writer through May of 1936, when he accepted an offer to go to Hollywood and write screenplays.

Very little survives from the Chicago-Wyllis Cooper era but a number of his 1934-1935 radio scripts would later be recycled for use on Fantasies from Lights Out (summer of 1945), two additional revivals of the series in the summers of 1946 and 1947, and a number of episodes of Quiet Please (1947-1949). Cooper’s style of more often a first-person narrative, sometimes with a stream-of-consciousness approach. 

Beginning with the broadcast of June 3, 1936, Arch Oboler would take over as the new script writer for Lights Out. Oboler, hoping to maintain the style of Cooper, carried over the stream-of-consciousness technique for many of his radio scripts. Oboler would be paid $50 for every half-hour script he provided to NBC, later contracted to $75 beginning November 18, 1936, then $100 by September of 1937. Oboler would not be the only script writer for Lights Out during this time period, but he certainly wrote the majority of the scripts.

Oboler’s first script for Lights Out would ultimately become the most talked about over the years, “Burial Services,” broadcast June 3, 1936. Because a recording is not known to exist, we have only the radio script to consult. Following the signature opening of 13 chime notes, the audience is introduced to two grave diggers who were asked to prepare a coffin for services. The young girl, Jeanie, died of apparent heart failure on the morning of her wedding day. In the background, the pleas of the young girl who lay comatose, paralyzed, unable to speak or move, begged to be heard or observed. But the casket remained closed as the men and women who gathered for the burial service, exchanged words of encouragement to each other. For the benefit of the audience, the inner thoughts of those same characters revealed a different story. Jeanie’s mother wanted the girl dead to inherit a fortune. Tom Randolph, Jeanie’s fiancé, now finds himself the adoration of Jeanie’s sister, Irene. The only kind words spoken during the drama was that of the minister, who delivered his speech. At the conclusion of the drama, Jeanie gave one last attempt to alert the men and women who attended the burial service, but the casket was closed shut. As the casket was lowered in the grave, and the minister delivered the final words, one of the undertaker’s assistants remarked, “Gosh, Joe! She did look alive!”

Following the broadcast, the network received letters from multiple listeners who felt the horror was too realistic and should not have been broadcast. Despite the fact the program was a late-night horror offering designed for a specific clientele, it would be this incident that Oboler would later be prompted to issue a warning before every Lights Out broadcast that he scripted during the 1942-43 season. (“Lights Out brings you stories of the supernatural and the super-normal… dramatizing the fantasies and the mysteries of the unknown. We tell you this frankly so if you wish to avoid the excitement and tension of these imaginative plays, we urge you, calmly but sincerely, to turn off your radio now.”)

Arch Oboler and Boris Karloff

Like Cooper, Oboler would soon make the trip out to Hollywood to write for numerous programs including the Rudy Vallee variety program, The Chase and Sanborn Program starring Edgar Bergen, Your Hollywood Parade, The Texaco Star Theatre program, and the Good News program. Among the many dramatic sketches which Oboler would provide for the guest stars on those programs, Oboler would pen the now-historically-notorious “Adam and Eve” sketch that featured Mae West in the lead.

In the spring of 1938, Boris Karloff signed contract to make five guest appearance on Lights Out, a program which rarely had any celebrities make guest appearances. Known for playing killers and ghouls on the silver screen, the actor’s appearances on any horror program were considered gold for both sponsors and the network. Arch Oboler was being paid $500 per Lights Out radio script in 1938, and the network agreed to pay $750 per script if Boris Karloff played the lead. (Contract between Oboler and NBC was dated March 28, 1938.) The five broadcasts originated from WMAQ, the radio studio in Chicago, where Karloff was in town for the stage production of The Tell-Tale Heart.

Among those five consecutive broadcasts were two that are noteworthy to mention for the fact that the radio broadcasts do not exist in collector hands. In “Three Matches” (April 13, 1938), young Sally Taylor is slated to marry the wealthy Eric Marden (played by Boris Karloff), whom no one in society likes. Marden is 30 years older than Sally. At the cathedral Marden waits impatiently for Sally to arrive, only to discover she was a no-show. A telegram arrived indicating that she was appreciative for him helping her, and Sally’s sister, Jean, but she could not marry Marden on the grounds that she truly loved Vincent Rogers. When the members of the family learn the news, Marden is subjected to laughter and embarrassment. 

One month later, the newlyweds return from their honeymoon. To show no hard feelings, Marden invites the lovebirds to his cabin high up in the mountains, away from society. The countryside was lonely and desolate. When Vincent and Sally share a laugh, the psychotic Marden Marden takes the laughing personal and pulls a gun, shooting Vincent and Sally dead. After arranging for the car to go over the cliff and explode, burning in a rubble, Marden laughs madly as he plans to marry Jean Taylor. 

Weeks pass and Marden woos the young lady, then arranges for marriage. After the wedding, the two venture to Marden’s lonely countryside cabin. Jean flees into the storm to escape, realizing she made an error in judgement. Marden, however, in trying to stay warm and figuring Jean will return when she realizes she has nowhere to go, lights a number of matches to get a fire started in the fireplace. Every time he lit a match, he caught a glimpse of Sally and hears her ghostly voice. When the ghostly figure shows up at the door, Marden beckons her in. He soon discovers that, as she held him in embrace, her wedding dress was on fire. Her face turned into flames. Eric Marden suffers a horrible and agonizing pain. As his body, scorched and dead, lay on the ground, the voice of Sally could be heard with a triumphant finality in the way she speaks: “Eric… Now there’s nothing left of you… to rot!”

In the episode titled “Night on the Mountain” (broadcast April 20, 1938), Karloff played a convicted felon named Roger Thomson who, having been found guilty of murder, was electrocuted in the chair – but not before begging for a second chance. Lying in the morgue, Thomson discovers the electric that coursed through his veins never killed him but instead made his blood bubble. Thomson was now a walking vampire who bit the neck of the doctor, the prison guard and anyone else who stood in his way. Drinking the blood of his victims, to stay alive, the killer hid in a cave up in the mountains, where bats flew out to feed. Thomson waited until the police dragnet died down and then made for the cabin in the woods. Hoping to seek revenge against a woman named Ruth, who Thomson loved and killed for, the walking vampire wandered the forest and grew so weak that at one point he had to attack a young boy and drink the youth’s blood. During his climatic encounter with Ruth, Thomson discovers she was indeed in love with him – not the man he killed who he thought was her secret lover. Not wanting to exact revenge against her, Thomson returned to the prison where the warden once again had to walk his condemned man to the electric chair – and this time Thomson is begging for the electric current.

Boris Karloff’s friendship with Arch Oboler remained more professional than personal. Karloff enjoyed acting before the microphone as it never affected his screen career and such acting assignments added income to his bottom line. After a brief discussion, Oboler and Karloff agreed to continue a series of horror dramas, penned by Oboler, using the Lights Out! name, if Oboler would be able to get a sponsor to afford Karloff’s fee.

In a letter dated May 18, 1938, Oboler told Karloff that “the fantasy series is still doing well; they tell me it should happen by the end of July.” On August 30, Oboler wrote to Karloff: “Believe it or not, the R and R agency is even more enthusiastic about the program than ever. I’m to have a conference with the sponsor sometime within the next few days at which time definite plans for the fall are to be made.”

Sadly, the deal never went through. On December 23, Oboler wrote back to Robert Kendall of NBC notifying the network that “I am cancelling the agreement dated March 28^th, 1938, authorizing you to sell my services on a program titled Lights Out starring Boris Karloff.” Sadly, the proposed weekly series with Karloff in the lead never met fruition.