They Made Him What He is Today
Trendle, a horseman himself, said, "No, Arabians are too small. But the white is a good idea--he'll stand out at night as well as by day. Another thing; remember when you were a kid and used to lick your thumb and stamp the palm of your hand whenever you saw a white horse? That'll help fix it in kids' minds."
A second conference was called a week later. "Let's run over our stuff," Trendle said. "Well, this guy is decent, athletic, and 'up on the bit'--you know: alert and enterprising. Maybe he has been unjustly banished and is waiting to come into his own again. Anyhow, he goes around righting wrongs against tremendous odds and then disappearing immediately afterwards. I see him as a sort of lone operator. He could even be a former Texas ranger---"
"There's his name!" someone interrupted. "The Lone Ranger! It's got everything!"
This second conference produced one other development. The studio manager was flipping a souvenir penny as he listened--a penny with an aluminum ring around it. Aluminum ring, silver ring--"How about silver shoes on the horse?" he asked, "We could use them for premiums too."
This was adopted. Now Trendle and his staff stood back and looked at their creature the raw material was there. All it needed was someone to blow the breath of life into it. They had their man in Fran Striker, a free-lance script writer from Buffalo, who had done a series called Warner Lester, Manhunter, which WXYZ had already used and liked. On the strength of it, Trendle telephoned Striker and told him what he had in mind. Striker took it from there.
Edward L. Wheeler, the author of the Deadwood Dick series, never went west of Philadelphia in his life. Striker had never been west of Buffalo at the time, and even now he has never been west of Michigan. All that he knew of the West he had learned from a great-uncle who had once served drinks to Mark Twain and Bret Harte across a bar in Washoe County, Nevada.
Striker began by visualizing the Ranger as just over six feet tall and weighing around 190 pounds--a good working uild for a Western hero. Such a man, riding a super-horse with silver shoes, would naturally have the finest possible equipment; ivory-handled guns, for instance. The silver shoes reminded Striker of a former series in which he had identified Robin Hood by silver-tipped arrows ("Zounds, my lord! This shaft was loosed by none other than the outlaw of Sherwood!"), so he gave the Ranger silver bullets for the same purpose. Bullets and shoes dictated the super-horse's name: Silver. As a final identification, Striker groped around for a aspecial call that the Ranger could use when he wanted Silver to come or to gallop off, "Yippy!" and "Git-up!" were commonplace. Besides, the last syllable had to be a long one, so that the actor could sustain it, "Hi-Yi, Silver! Awa-a-ay!" was close to the idea; Striker was satisfied with it, but he let it go through anyhow.
His first script was revised fiftten times before Trendle gave it a trial broadcast, late at night, and unannounced except to the office staff and the sales force. They reported that they liked the story, but they didn't like the Ranger's way of talking; his language seemed to have an Eastern flavor, Trendle stood firm. The ranger was an Easterner, he said. He might even be from Harvard. At least he was an educated man, and he was going to talk like one.
The signature to this first script was: "Come along, Silver! ... That's the boy! ... Hi-yi! (hearty laugh) ... Now cut loose, and awa-a-ay! (Hoofs pounding harder and fade-out)."
Striker's Ranger was a happy-go-lucky swashbuckler who laughed at the discomfited crooks as he rode off. Trendle saw him as a sterner character, "the embodiment," in his own phrase, "of granted prayer." So presently all suggestions of humor were erased; the Ranger never smiled again. Trendle didn't like the "Hi-yi," either. For days after the unofficial broadcast, the staff galloped around the studio shouting "Hi-Yo!" and "Hi-Yi!" History does not preserve the name of the genius who finally evolved "Hi-Yo!"
The official broadcast was delayed until Striker could furnish a backlog of two dozen scripts. He ran into difficulties as he turned them out. Lone or not, the Ranger needed someon to talk to, to develop the plots. He also needed someone who could ferret out evidence of wrongdoing and present it for action. The situation was tailor-made for a Mesquite Mary or a Prairie Rose, but Striker knew that the merest breath of romance would blow the Ranger's young audience right away from their radios. His solution was to create a loyal Indian companion. For a name, he went back to another of his old serials, a mystery which had featured a semi-savage named Gobo. He juggled the vowels around with a fresh set of consonants, and that's how Tonto was born. (Theoretically, Tonto belongs to the Potawatomi tribe of Michigan; what he's doing so far from home not even Striker seems to know.)
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This article originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on October 14, 1939.