To accommodate different time zones, each half-hour Lone Ranger episode was performed live three times. Although Beemer’s voice is the one most closely associated with the show, he actually was just one of several radio Rangers. A dapper little actor named Jack Deeds played the title role in unconvincing fashion for the first six episodes. When Deeds arrived at the station drunk one evening, he was fired on the spot by Jewell, who took over for that night’s broadcast.
There is a woman who works locally at a library whose mother took her on a trolley car to voice whatever children were on the show. She still attends conferences on radio shows personalities. A dying breed I am sure.
For more about THE LONE RANGER in Detroit, click here
Have you ever listened to one of these radio shows?Or any radio show? I have not.
16 comments:
I always love learning more about different places, Patti - thanks
I loved radio shows as a kid and listened to many hundreds of them, including The Lone Ranger. I still listen to them occasionally on XM.
The only thing other than news/music/discussion I can remember on the radio was Art Linkletter's House Party, which my mother listened to when I was very young.
I'm not sure whether I listened to the Lone Ranger on radio. I think so since I was into The Shadow, Inter Sanctum and the like. As with many of my generation, I watched the Lone Ranger, Cisco Kid, Roy Rogers, and others religiously on TV. I also went to the Saturday movies which were mostly westerns and Batman serials.
THE LONE RANGER radio shows are still being played on SIRUS/XM radio. At one time they were available on CD sets.
I see this is on one of our TV channels regularly all of a sudden. I saw a few episodes over the years but not many
Lots of TV channels showing the old shows. This was radio in Detroit.
I have never listened to an old-time radio show. We were truly from the first television generation. Radio was always rock & roll, news or a baseball game to me.
I loved the shows that were on radio on Saturday morning and in the afternoon and evening. I particularly liked Sgt. Preston of the Yukon and his dog King. Also, Lone Ranger, Sky King, The Whistler, others. I wasn't as fond of the comedy shows.
How I LOVED the Lone Ranger as a child in the early fifties and later on TV....
Hi Ho Silver and Away. And let's not Get um Up Scout!!! :)
I'm not old enough to have heard the original broadcasts, but my father got me interested in listening to re-broadcasts of "Fibber McGee and Molly" on WOR radio when I was a teen. When I found out there were other shows like The Shadow, The Green Hornet and even The Lone Ranger I was hooked for years. I think they were all part of a nostalgia series and all aired on WOR-AM. Could have been WNEW, I can't remember exactly and I don't feel like checking it with an internet search. These were New York area radio stations that we listened to. This was all in the 1970s when I was in junior high school and high school. The series lasted a long time. Later, CBS Radio Mystery Theater drawing inspiration from the old thriller radio shows like Inner Sanctum and Lights Out! was created and aired weekly original radio shows, most written specifically for the series and others scripts based on well known stories or other radio scripts. It was a pretty popular radio series throughout the late 1970s and into the early 1980s. I used to tape them with our portable tape player and had a small collection of the shows on cassette for a long time.
It would be fun if they could find a way to play them on cable somehow. Or I bet there is a podcast of some of them.
I listened to a raft of shows as a kid in the late 40s, early 50s, Lone Ranger among them...other shows will start coming back to me after I've posted this. Sorry to learn these pioneers got cheated. Enuf to bring a tear trickling down Tonto's cheek.
THE CBS RADIO MYSTERY THEATER was actually weeknightly, not weekly. That was part of its problem, that they were grinding out five episodes a week for most of its run, while paying abysmally for scripts, and both aspects would tell, too often. THE SEARS RADIO THEATER of 1979 on CBS had the same sort of schedule, in fact they ran as a two-hour block on the network that year, though I don't know whether the Sears anthology paid better for scripts. Averaged about as wildly uneven, including with the few new ones it ran in its second season, after moving networks and becoming THE MUTUAL RADIO THEATER in 1980.
One of the many podcasts devoted to radio drama, one which I would regularly list in the Tuesday round-up, would be THE BIG BROADCAST, a Sunday night broadcast showcase with some commentary which has been running on the American University station in DC, WAMU-FM, since the early '60s...the four-hour selection is also webbed for listening convenience at
http://wamu.org/show/the-big-broadcast/
Most of the series they run on TBB are pretty good, and lean toward the 1950s and other late network drama, such as GUNSMOKE (CBS 1952-1960, and, of course, a tv series as well beginning 1955) and YOURS TRULY, JOHNNY DOLLAR, which ran on CBS along with SUSPENSE as a weekly series till 1962, the last two weekly drama series on CBS till their revival of drama series in the '70s. DRAGNET, a big hit for NBC radio before also moving to television and running in both media for several seasons, is another staple on TBB. Some of the series they run on TBB, such as the Mutual/MBS SUPERMAN show which pops up from time to time in 15-minute installments, can be safely skipped over. It was even worse than the worst of the Mutual or later ABC episodes of THE LONE RANGER or its (then) modern-day offshoot, THE GREEN HORNET.
A quick survey some of the latter-day radio drama of the '60s through today:
http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2016/04/1970s80s-new-radio-drama-in-us.html
The longest running US radio drama series is supposedly UNSHACKLED! -- a Christian/religious radio drama broadcast live from the Pacific Garden Mission homeless center here in Chicago. It began in 1950 and as far as I know is still running. Joe and I listened to one episode a long time ago on a weekend drive out of the city. Its message about alcoholism and abuse in a marriage was so heavy handed and the performances so melodramatic that we found it ridiculous and turned it off. More about the show, its mission, and history can be found here.
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