Sunday, August 1, 2021

The Lone Ranger: The Early Years, 1933 - 1937

As a friend of mine once told me, I would be amiss if I did not take advantage of my blog once a year and promote a book I wrote, or co-wrote. While I always felt doing such would be a blatant commercial, I cannot argue over the rationale and today I take pride in mentioning that my latest book is now available for purchase from www.martingrams.biz

For two decades I have been gathering material at various archives and tracking down family relatives of principal participants to amass a large collection of materials related to The Lone Ranger. While I was busy publishing my findings on other subjects, The Lone Ranger remained a back-burner project. Thanks to the downtime from the global pandemic, my co-author and I decided it was time to sit down and finish the book. My co-author spent two decades before me so technically this book was four decades in the works.

The reason we decided to publish a book focusing on the first five years is understood by the die-hard fans of the radio program. The Lone Ranger premiered on the evening of January 31, 1933, but it was not until February 1938 that the program was recorded on a regular basis. Thus the first five years are considered "lost" or virtually unknown. Little has been documented and even less preserved in book form. Not only did Terry Salomonson and myself document the history and origin of those five years but we also document the early adventures that do not exist in recorded form. From their juvenile sidekick Little Davey, the canine sidekick, to the historic broadcast when Tonto was engaged to Chief Thundercloud's daughter... all of the stories are preserved here in both prose and occasional script reprints. Hundreds of historic documents and photographs, never before published, are included. 

On a personal note, Terry and I are relieved that we finally got this project completed and published, knowing we filled in a gap sorely needed to preserve the legacy of The Lone Ranger.