The Birth of an Institution
Trendle couldn't believe the evidence of his eyes. He wanted to wait for further proof before trying to sell his program to a sponsor. Proof came soon.
Every July, Detroit's Department of Recreation gives a school field day on Belle Isle. This year, 1933, it promised the children that the Lone Ranger would appear in person. He did, masked, on a white horse. the police were prepared to handle a crowd of 20,000--the most that Belle Isle could hold comfortably; 70,000 came. The children broke through the lines and knocked one another down, struggling to ge near their hero. The situation became so dangerous that the police had to appeal to the Ranger himself to restore order. He never dared make another public appearance.
Trendle knew now that he had the world by the tail with a downhill pull. He sold the program to the makers of Silvercup Bread (the trade name was pure coincidence). The first commercial broadcast was on November twenty-seventh. A month later the program was extended to WGN, Chicago. Another month and WOR, Newark was added. (WXYZ, WGN, and WOR were the nucleus of the Mutual Broadcasting System, formed that year.) Beginning January, 1937, the Pacific Coast got the program over the Don Lee System. That April, the Yankee and Colonial networks were signed up.
All these were so-called "live" broadcasts, piped directly from the stage at WXYZ. In February, 1938, the program was first offered in transcription form. Today the Lone Ranger's 140 stations--including Newfoundland, Ontario, Hawaii and New Zealand--are roughly have "live" and half transcription form. They get him three nights a week--Monday, Wednesday and Friday--at one of his three nightly shows. The first, at 7:30 E.S.T., goes to the Detroit district and the East. The second, at 7:30 Central Time, goes to Chicago. The third, at 7:30 Pacific Time, goes to the West Coast.
The cast plays all three shows with the same sincerity and intensity. The cast gives everything it's got. When two characters are supposed to be jogging along on horseback, they actually jog on their feet, so that their talk will have the proper cadence. When they are supposed to be dismounting, they actually swing their legs and grunt as they "land." When one of them is "knocked down," someone actually falls. After a long bit of action, the Ranger sometimes has to signal the control room to keep the music going until he can catch his breath.
One of the best features of the show is the sound effects. To represent galloping horses, the men stamp ordinary bathroom plungers into a trough of sand or gravel, according to the terrain. Every studio has had trouble imitating a gunshot; even a cap pistol would almost break the microphone. WXYZ's solution was so good that NBC sent an expert out to investigate it: They smack a leather cushion with a cane.
Once the script called for an effect that the men couldn't get. The Ranger and Silver were taking a short cut to head off some cattle-rustlin' varmints, and had to plunge over a cliff into a river. The splash defied WXYZ for two hours; nothing even approached the right sound. Suddenly someone in the control room shouted, "That's it! That's perfect!" The staff was bewildered. Nobody had done anything. Presently they discovered that one of the actors, bored with waiting had crumpled up his newspaper.
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This article originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on October 14, 1939.