On January 30, 1933, The Lone Ranger debuted on Detroit’s WXYZ radio station. The “masked rider of the plains” was created by Detroit station owner George Trendle and writer Fran Striker, and the program was to go on to great success on radio and later on television and in the movies. The Lone Ranger never smoked, swore, or drank alcohol; he used grammatically correct speech free of slang; and, most important, he never shot to kill. However, today his sidekick, the Indian scout Tonto, is well-recognized as a politically incorrect depiction of a Native American.
