Clayton Moore: The Lone Ranger

When Clayton Moore died back in 1999, some online friends and I got to talking about what he'd meant to us, growing up in that cowboy-drenched era of the late fifties and early sixties. Here's what I had to say:

Back in 1957, my dad was a vice consul at the U.S. Consulate in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I was just old enough to have started watching TV, and during the week my favorite show was "Watch With Mother," an innocuous package of benign marionettes and cute creatures. But come Saturday afternoon, it was something decidedly more exciting: "The Lone Ranger" and his blazing six guns, which, besides being a completely new kind of thrill for me, also provided my first introduction to the culture of my native country.

My first lessons in telling time came from the Lone Ranger—if I recall correctly, the show aired at 2 PM on Saturday afternoons, and I knew exactly where the hands on the clock had to be when it was time for that show.

Then from our living room in Bangor, I'd sit transfixed and learn about the United States and what it stood for, ironically, not from my Foreign Service father (who was actually representing our country abroad), but from the Masked Rider of the Plains.

Besides being my first exposure to abstract notions like justice and living by a personal code, I also became convinced that everyone back home (which was really just a hazy memory to me) lived in log cabins. So I was sorely disappointed when we finally returned to the States in 1959 to discover that my grandparents' house was really just clapboard siding. (Well, it WAS horizontal like the logs...)

There was no question of my devotion. When I go back and look at my dad's slides of Christmas in 1958, there I am, 3½ years old in full Lone Ranger regalia and mask, riding my hobby horse and pointing my chrome six guns at the camera.

Back in the States during the years that followed, I discovered new heroes—first Popeye, then Superman, and later Spider-Man. But despite these new, colorful characters, I never lost sight of my very first hero, the Lone Ranger.

Throughout the early and mid-sixties, I rarely missed the program. Even when our television was on the fritz (a relatively common occurrence), you'd find me at my grandmother's house at 5:30 in the afternoon, ready for my daily dose of those "golden days of yesteryear."

One Christmas, Santa Claus left me the Aurora model kit of the Lone Ranger, which I assembled immediately. Then I took that model into my dad's study where it became more than plastic and paint—I could listen to Dad's scratchy, old recording of "The William Tell Overture" over and over, and astride Silver, the Lone Ranger would leap across the plains of my imagination, in eternal pursuit of unseen outlaws, as in those wonderful opening credits.

About a dozen years ago, I had to write an essay, as part of the application process to enter the Foreign Service, like my father before me. In that essay, I reflected on the heroes of my childhood, and how they'd taught me that an individual can make a difference in the world—how I hoped to do that myself in some small way, if I entered government service. Of course, foremost among those whom I mentioned was the Lone Ranger.

So I guess no one will never call me an intellectual—when I hear that music I always think of the Masked Man first, and of the hours of enjoyment and the lessons I learned from that show and from Clayton Moore, the man who was the Lone Ranger.