Here's to you, Captain Video!

Sunday, November 27, 2005

Up until the time I was about 14, I had a weekly date to hustle into my house and tune in to the 15-minute-long "Lone Ranger" radio program sponsored by Cheerios breakfast cereal, each Wednesday evening at 7:30 p.m., Eastern Saving Time. It would ordinarily be, after all, a sultry summer evening, still light enough to see for another hour, and I'd have to bow out of my daily endless softball game across the street in the empty lot. I was, among all my friends -- and they were legion, since this was in the late 1940's, and male adults, having returned from World War II, began to have very large families -- and I hated to desert my friends, but my loyalty to "the masked man and his faithful Indian companion Tonto" was first on my list of priorities. There would be plenty of time for softball after the show, the plots of several such shows remaining with me to this day. Radio shows were a powerful prod to their listeners‚ imaginations. And that, I guess, is what made the "Lone Ranger" radio show so utterly tantalizing to me. I can still tell an authentic Lone Ranger fan by how he answers the trivia question, "Who was Dan Reid?" (Hint: it had something to do with the Lone Ranger's background, long before he took to wearing a black mask, to conceal his identity.) From 1949 to 1953, "Captain Video" came on nightly from 7 to 7:30 p.m., on the DuMont television network, Channel 5 on our dial. (CBS, NBC, and ABC: channels 2, 4, and 7 were your only other choices of networks if you lived in the New York City area back then) I don't remember what preceded that half-hour show, whether another children's show or an unblinking test pattern, I don't remember. What I still remember vividly was the sudden appearance of a picture of a screen-filling black-and-white castle atop a steep mountain and the blazing orchestral music from Wagner's "Overture to the Flying Dutchman." From that moment we were given a basic introduction to the show, presented by a fellow with the same very deep bass voice as introduced "The Lone Ranger."

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