The ink is faded but still legible on an 8x10, black-and-white photograph hanging in the bedroom. The inscription reads “Kemo Sabay,” Clayton Moore, The Lone Ranger. The masked avenger crouches in a desert setting, a saguaro cactus in the background. Besides the requisite black mask, the Lone Ranger wears a bandana around his neck, a long-sleeved snap pearl western shirt, a fancy belt with silver studs, and a revolver strapped to his right hip. He looks ready for action.
When I was a kid, Clayton Moore, the Lone Ranger, came to Pleasure Island, a short-lived amusement park in Wakefield, Massachusetts, about an hour from our home in Allenstown, N.H. It was the early 1960s. The Lone Ranger television series ended in 1957, but that hardly slowed Moore, who continued to make public appearances dressed as the Lone Ranger for decades. His sidekick, Tonto, didn’t show up for this appearance.
The show led viewers to believe that Tonto was calling the Lone Ranger “faithful friend” or “trusty scout.” Tonto called the Lone Ranger Kemo Sabe in every show I recall. If the Lone Ranger ever reciprocated, I don’t recall it.
The term is almost certainly made up, not from any specific tribal language. One account that sounds plausible is that the show’s director spent time at a boys’ camp in Michigan, near Mullet Lake, called Camp Kee-Mo Sah-Bee.
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For grins, I went to YouTube and found the first-ever television episode of The Lone Ranger, which aired on Sept. 15, 1949. The black-and-white show starts with the now-iconic William Tell Overture by Rossini. The pilot show provides the origin story of the Lone Ranger:
A half-dozen Texas Rangers are ambushed by the Butch Cavendish gang, betrayed by a bandit who purports to help the Rangers but leads them into the trap. The traitor is then shot by Cavendish. All seven are left for dead.
But wait! One Ranger has survived, crawls to a nearby creek, and lies there, a water-soaked bandana across his face. And wait again! The traitor also has survived and crawled into the hills above the ambush site.
A few observations: The death scenes are hokey, the dialogue stilted, and the horses quite adept at picking their way up and down rocky trails. The black-and-white scenery is rugged and beautiful.
Enter Tonto, who finds the dead Rangers and the one fellow — John Reid — who is unconscious by the water. Tonto and Reid appear to have a history. Years earlier, Reid found Tonto after an attack and saved his life. It is time to return the favor.
He tells Reid, “Why, you Kemo Sabe. You trusty scout.” (Tonto speaks pidgin English, of course.) He nurses him back to health. Tonto buries the five dead Rangers, including Reid’s brother, also a Texas Ranger. Reid has him dig a fake sixth grave. Tonto also fashions a mask out of Reid’s brother’s leather vest.
The Lone Ranger is born. “No one is going to know I’m alive. I’ll wear a disguise of some sort,” he tells Tonto.
Tonto replies, “You’re all alone now. You, Lone Ranger.”
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Television actors and pro athletes hustled to make ends meet in the 1960s, before massive financial contracts. I saw Roy Rogers astride his horse Trigger as a child, several members of the Boston Celtics who were promoting a newly opened gas station, and Gino Cappelletti, the talented receiver for the Boston Patriots, promoting a furniture store.
My dad diligently found such events and took his kids to meet these larger-than-life folks. The photos I obtained are long gone, except for that photo of the Lone Ranger and an autographed photo of Mickey Mantle when he came to Longview to open one of his country cooking restaurants. I was always a Red Sox fan, brainwashed by birth to hate the Yankees, but who could resist an autographed photo of the Mick, inscribed to me?
Certainly not me.