Tonto and the Lone Ranger...

Ran across a photo recently in the local paper of Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto, Clayton Moore's sidekick in the long-running 1950s TV western, "The Lone Ranger".

It brought back a lot of memories. Back in those days, the TV western was plentiful with half hour and hourly series such as Johnny Yuma "The Rebel", "Have Gun-Will Travel","The Cisco Kid", followed by "Gunsmoke" with James Arness and "Wyatt Earp" with Hugh O'Brian.

How many hours did I spend watching the old black and white tube in those days? The answer is plenty. I can recall all of them as if it where yesterday. A few years back I attended a festival down in Tombstone. The celebrity guest was Hugh O'Brian. I expected to see a young man in his 30s, instead I witnessed a man older than me, who walked the streets of Tombstone a little slower than I had remembered him doing so as the Sheriff of the "town too tough to die".

Our Western heroes are timeless! And most of them are gone now. Silverheels passed away in 1980 at the age of 67, while Moore died in 1999 at the age of 85. They spent their final years within a few miles of each other in the city of Calabasas, California. Nick Adams, who starred in "The Rebel" died tragically at the age of 36 in 1958 of a drug overdose. I can still recall the theme song from "The Rebel", which was sung by the great Johnny Cash. While John Wayne filled the silver screen, these men came into our living room in the late 50s and early 60s and caught the bad guy. Our parents would then turn off the television and either send us to bed or tell us to get our homework done.

Oh, the age of innocence!

As for O'Brian, he's 84 years old and lives in Benedict Canyon in southern California. He's working on his bibliography.I still recall John Wayne's final film, The "Shootist". In this 1976 film, Wayne portrays J.B. Books, a dying gunfighter who sets up his final shootout with a handful of bad guys, one of them is O'Brian.

My goodness, that was 33 years ago.