The Lone Ranger Rides

Clayton Moore played the masked cowboy riding high on his horse Silver in the TV favorite The Lone Ranger during the early fifties.  With the help of the wise, quiet Indian Tonto, played by Jay Silverheels, the duo went about righting injustices in over one hundred episodes.  Moore had the odd fate for an actor of wearing a mask onscreen so that even during the fame of the show, he was hardly recognized.  Perhaps for this, there is no other actor who clung to his role do diligently, regularly donning the mask and costume to go out in public, some say even while in his car at a drive-through for fast-food.  He was seen wearing his Lone Ranger costume shortly before his death of a heart attack in 1999 at age eighty-five.  Silverheels took much less affinity to his role as Tonto and passed away quickly, though coughing laconically, at age sixty in 1980, of pneumonia.