The Story Behind the Story of The Lone Ranger

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. The show where America is the star and the American people. Silver Bullets, the William Tell Overture, and the phrase Kemosabe all were thrust into the cultural mainstream at the height of the Great Depression in 1931 with The Lone Ranger. Here to tell the story of The Lone Ranger is Stephen Iwanu, author of the book Yesteryear, which is about the creators of The Lone Ranger.

Take it away.

Stephen, with his faithful Indian companion, the daring, unresourceful, masked Rider of the Planes, led the fight for law and order in the early Western United States. Nowhere in the pages of history can one find a greater champion of justice? In response to hundreds of requests from interested listeners, this Lone Ranger program will retell the story of the origin of The Lone Ranger.

George W. Trendall was born in Ohio in 1884. He graduated from law school in 1908, and his specialty was contract law and negotiation, and he was very good at his job. He had a shrewd mind, a keen sense of business acumen, and really a good business instinct, knowing when to get in and when to get out of various endeavors. One of his first investments, even before he had graduated law school, was in Nickelodeons. These were the forerunners of the movie theaters and palaces that would come later. They were storefronts. They were dark. They were kind of smoky and cramped, uncomfortable wooden chairs, and they had a reputation for attracting unsavory characters, either owners or people just hanging out. Local government officials didn’t really like them too much. They thought it was trouble. But Trendall was drawn to them because he thought he could make money from them. He saw this as something that people were drawn to. But the film industry was changing, and they began to produce longer and longer films. Trendall thought that the days of the Nickelodeons were numbered because people would want to go and watch these longer feature films in something more comfortable, and so he put together a group of investors and they built the Columbia Theater, which was the first large movie house in Detroit, and it was literally an instant success. People would line up to go watch the movies in a comfortable setting, totally different than what the Nickelodeons were. By the end of 1928, Trendall owned 20 movie theaters throughout the Detroit area, and again, he had that keen sense of timing when to get in, when to get out. He sold all 20 of those theaters right before the stock market crash of 1929, and he insisted on cash. He didn’t want stocks, he didn’t want promissory notes. It had to be cash. But the Depression didn’t skip over Trendall. He saw his net worth drop from three million dollars to about a quarter of a million dollars. Still very well off, but his finances were going in the wrong direction, and he was looking for something to invest in, to make cash, to make money quickly, and radio was growing. Radio was quite different than it is today. Radio was the fastest growing medium in the United States in the late twenties and early thirties. Having a radio in the home was a big deal because now you were connected from outside your community and you could hear programs from New York, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, even in your little hometown. The radio stations had full in-house orchestras that would play between shows to introduce shows, to set the mood during radio dramas. Radio stations had their own theatrical troupe — you know, their own performing artists, their own radio actors that would perform locally produced talent. And he knew that. He thought that was the next big opportunity in entertainment. Even during the Depression, he thought people — and he was right — would finance radios to have in their home. No longer could they go out. They didn’t have the cash to go out. So now the entertainment had to come into their house. And so he bought radio station WGHP and changed the call letters to WXYZ, and their tagline was “WXYZ, The Last Word in Radio.”

And he had a vision of growing it into a network of stations. But he was a tough customer. He was losing money, and he would keep two sets of books, and he would show the fake set to his employees and say, “You’re going to have to take a pay cut. I mean, look how bad the radio station’s doing. Take a pay cut. I’m going to have to fire you. I have to let you go.” And of course, there were no jobs during the Depression, so his employees had no alternative but to take the pay cut. Same thing when he was hiring people, he would say, “Uh, you know, I look at my books. I can’t afford to pay you much. I can’t afford to pay you for the first month that you’re going to work for me,” which of course he could, and so a lot of times he had people working gratis for him on the promise that better days were coming. So he was very frugal, and it was during this time that he earned the nickname, The Miser of Motown. One of the biggest moves that he made as a radio station owner was to sever ties with Columbia Broadcasting. So this meant that WXYZ would no longer have access to the syndicated shows that CBS was producing, and Trendall’s thought process was, “We’ll produce it locally. We’ll use local and freelance talent, and it will be cheaper than paying CBS.” And so it was a business decision that made him pivot away from that nationally syndicated broadcasting to locally produced broadcasting, and that’s when his life and Fran Striker’s life intersected.

When we come back, more of this remarkable creative story, also a remarkable business story. How these things happen, how these ideas happen, how these characters happen — these characters that live in the American fabric long after the authors and creators die. The story of how The Lone Ranger came to be continues here on Our American Stories. And we return to Our American Stories and our story on The Lone Ranger and how it came to be with author Stephen Iwanu, author of the book Yesteryear. When we last left off, Stephen was telling us about The Miser of Motown, George W. Trendall, who led a cost-saving crusade at his flagship radio station in Detroit, WXYZ, during the Great Depression. It was because of this that he’d become acquainted with a little-known station manager and scriptwriter out of New York named Fran Striker.

Let’s return to the story.

It’s funny. I have no idea how I heard about Fran Striker. I think someone had mentioned in passing that, “Oh, the guy that wrote The Lone Ranger lived in Buffalo,” which is my hometown, and I thought, “Well, that can’t be right. I’m a Buffalo writer. I would know if the man who invented, created The Lone Ranger was from here.” And I looked it up. I Googled it, and sure enough, he was a Buffalo guy. I was surprised and mad at myself, and I found out not only was he a Buffalo guy, he was a neighborhood guy. He went to high school about two blocks where I was living in a part of Buffalo called the Elmwood Village, and he lived over on Granger Place, which is just a few blocks north of me. And then I dug some more, and I thought, not only did he create The Lone Ranger, he also created The Green Hornet: “The biggest of all gang public enemies that even the T-men cannot recall!” And Sergeant Preston of the Yukon: “The Challenge of the Yukon!”

And I had never heard of him, so now I was really curious how someone could have such an impact on 20th-century American pop culture, and the common person doesn’t know his name. The Ranger was the first real hero that was extensively marketed. Think of fan clubs and spin-off toys, giveaway items, 18 Lone Ranger novels in hardback. The Lone Ranger has been an enduring character for the last 90 years. And then I did some more research, and depending on how you look at it, he was part of the best deal in entertainment history or the worst business deal in entertainment history. A lot of times you hear about these authors and, you know, they have, you know, terrible, traumatic childhoods. Striker was just the opposite. Striker was born in Buffalo on August 19, 1903, to Frank and Addie Striker, and by all accounts, he had a very healthy and wholesome family life. In his upbringing, fishing, hunting, and gardening, he had developed a love for the outdoors. He was a very smart, very precocious child. He was always very curious. He was always inquisitive, drawn to new things, and he was a joiner. He loved to join clubs: science clubs, church clubs, and youth groups. He ran track. He was in the band. He played the saxophone. He was on the student newspaper, and he sold his first short story and his first nonfiction article to a local Buffalo paper when he was only 12 years old. He was on the drama club. He was in the chemistry club, and when he went to the University of Buffalo after he graduated high school, he couldn’t decide on a fraternity. He knew he wanted to be in one, but he couldn’t decide. So he pledged multiple fraternities, and he got in trouble for it. He was called in front of the — I think the dean of academic affairs or student affairs — and said, “Hey, you can only pledge one fraternity!” And Fran said, “How can I pick one? They’re all such interesting, great guys!” While he was in college, he was a chemistry major, but what happened was his interest in theater outgrew his interest in chemistry, even though he was fascinated by it. He had up in his writing studio an old chemistry set, but it was all covered in dust because he was always pounding away on his Remington 16 typewriter. It was about 1927 when he decided to leave Buffalo and go to New York City, and he got a job with the Harry Miller Production Company, which produced live stage shows in New York City. This was a key moment in Striker’s life because even though he was only with the company and in New York City for a year, this is where he was exposed to professional theater, professional directing, professional acting, and more importantly, professional scriptwriting. So when Striker came back from New York City in 1928, his plan was to break into the theater. He found that kind of difficult — not difficult to be involved, but difficult to be paid. So he was drawn to the next big thing — what he thought was the next big thing — in entertainment, and that was radio. He took a job with WEBR. He would do announcing, he would do news reporting. He occasionally would step in and act on the radio, even though he was never really comfortable or talented in that regard. He even played his saxophone with the WEBR orchestra on occasion. Striker was promoted to WEBR’s station manager, so now he was much more focused. Instead of wearing all those different hats, he was really in charge of radio dramas, directing them and writing them, and this is, of course, where he flourished. He always had that affinity for writing, going back to when he was 12 years old, and now he was able to do it professionally, and hear his scripts performed live on the air. So 1929 was probably one of the most exciting times of Striker’s life.

We are told by the opposition that we must have a change, that we must have a new news.

The stock market crash of 1929 sent the nation and the world reeling into an economic depression. Unemployment rate in the United States was 24 percent, 12 million Americans were out of work, and over a quarter of a million families had lost their homes. And the Striker family was not immune. Striker became their financial supporter. They became his dependents. So by 1932, you know, he was supporting a dozen family members: his parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. They were all dependent on Striker to survive the Depression. So Striker was extremely prolific in writing radio dramas because he had to be, and it transformed into kind of a side business. He loved the idea of taking scripts that he had already written, had already aired (he owned all the rights), and selling them into other markets. I think of the early days of streaming services now, where everyone was scrambling to get content. Same thing in 1932. All these radio stations needed content to be performed live, and Striker was mailing out these scripts, kind of cold-calling, mailing them out cold to the stations. Now, this is 1932, so there were no copy machines; there were no printers. It was a typewriter and a carbon paper, and he would try to hit the key, strike the keys as hard as he could to get two or three copies out of one typing session, because everything had to be retyped, and so he would literally wear out the Remington 16 typewriters, which was his favorite typewriter. And sometimes they would be live on the air, and Striker was in the other room still typing up the script to how the show would end, and so he had one eye on the keyboard and one eye on the clock, knowing he had to finish the next page of the script, or the next two pages of the script, before there was dead air. You know, in these early days of radio, there was a lot of excitement about creating these radio scripts for live radio, and then, of course, there was that financial necessity of branching outward and reselling them to support his family. One of the radio stations that bought his scripts was WXYZ out of Detroit, and the first script that George W. Trendall, the owner of WXYZ in Detroit, bought was an old series called Warner Lester. Trendall was impressed with that script, and he requested more and more scripts from Striker. So by the end of 1932, Striker was supplying WXYZ with six half-hour scripts per week.

When we come back, more of this remarkable creative story, also a remarkable business story. How these things happen, how these ideas happen, how these characters happen — these characters that live in the American fabric long after the authors and creators die. The story of how The Lone Ranger came to be continues here on Our American Stories. And we return to Our American Stories and our story on The Lone Ranger and how it came to be with author Stephen Iwanu, author of the book Yesteryear. When we last left off, Stephen was telling us about how Fran Striker had become the primary breadwinner for his entire family during the Great Depression, making a lot of money on the side by selling repurposed radio drama scripts to George W. Trendall, the owner of the powerhouse signal in Detroit, WXYZ. Little did both of them know: one of those scripts was about to become a gold mine. Let’s return to the story.

So, in 1932, WXYZ and George W. Trendall had been counting on Striker for a lot of their radio content, and December of that year, Striker received a letter from the creative director from WXYZ saying, “You know, we thought about it, and we think we want to do a Western series. Put all the hokum in it.” That was the word they used, hokum. “You know, the masked rider, the rustler, the girl tied to the railroad tracks, two-gun bank robber. Can you write something like that?” And so Striker thought, “Well, of course I can.” So he dug out a series that had aired two years earlier on WEBR called Cover Wagon Days, and for whatever reason, he chose Episode 10 of that series to rewrite this new Western, and he came up with a new hero, The Lone Ranger. It’s a debate where The Ranger came from. I mean, certainly in that letter from WXYZ they mentioned a masked rider, but that’s as far as it went, and a lot of people think it’s still being debated that maybe he was influenced by a real-life figure, a man named Bass Reeves. Bass was a runaway slave, and he stole a Confederate horse, according to legend, and rode it out to the Oklahoma Territory. Oklahoma Territory during the Civil War years was kind of a refuge for deserters, outlaws, runaway slaves — a real interesting mix. And according to legend, when Bass Reeves got out there, you know, he lived with the Creek and Seminole tribes, and that’s when he learned how to shoot. And again, this is tall tales, but they said that he was good with either hand with rifle or pistol and shoot the hind leg off of a fly from 100 yards away. But once the Emancipation Proclamation was announced, Bass Reeves was made a U.S. Marshal, and he took his job seriously. Let’s just say that he arrested over 3,000 outlaws. He brought in 20 of them dead, saying that he killed them in self-defense. And he had the reputation of being someone who was for the common people.