[Our updates shouldn't all have to be paranormal. Surely some can be merely remarkable.]
One of the most famous creators of the 20th century lost his life right down the road I live on. It's ironic that so few Western New Yorkers know anything about Fran Striker: the father of the Lone Ranger!
Most remembered today as the creator of some unforgettable characters of TV, film, radio, and comics, Francis Hamilton "Fran" Striker (August 19, 1903–September 4, 1962) was born in Buffalo into a family that lived on Dearborn Street in Black Rock. Surely one of the most famous graduates of Lafayette High School, he attended the University of Buffalo, today's SUNY Buffalo. There he seems to have been more sociable than your typical geeky artist. (He was in a fraternity, for instance: Theta Chi.) He went into theater work in New York City before graduating. He came back to Buffalo as an announcer with then-WEBR radio (today WDCZ, I hear). By 1929 he was with WTAN in Cleveland and wrote his first screenplay. Not too long after he was drawn back to Buffalo by the offer of a job as station manager at WEBR.
Striker's skill as a dramatic storyteller brought him to the attention of George Trendle, the Detroit magnate hoping to launch an empire in media drama. It was before the era of TV. In Detroit, Striker wrote some colorfully titled early radio series like Thrills of the Secret Service, Dr. Fang, and Warner Lester, Manhunter.
It seems to have been in 1932 that the test flight of The Lone Ranger took to the air, and in Buffalo, on WEBR. When it was clear what a hit the Ranger and Tonto could be, it moved into the big time. A long association with Trendle started, and Striker's fame hit its peak. I'm not sure his finances ever did.
I hate to think the worst of people without digging into both sides of a story, but my first impression of this George Trendle (1884-1972) is not positive. The exploitation of artists by operators is such a stereotypical pattern that many of us tend to expect it. A lawyer and producer of hit series in early radio and TV like The Green Hornet and the fabulously successful The Lone Ranger, Trendle seems to have been no creator. Yet he made a serious attempt to convince people he devised the character of the Lone Ranger, and he managed to extort the legal rights away from Striker, which I see as outright robbery. (For $10 and an OK job.) Striker was under financial pressure all his life, and this transaction was during the Great Depression when so many people had lost everything. Striker had helped other people out, which added to his own stress. Even a fair deal with The Lone Ranger would have made him quite wealthy. It may have been the choice to give it up or gain nothing at all.
I object to the theft of intellectual property–to taking credit for the innovation and the hard work of others. It happens so much in the book business with paranormal topics that it's become a pet peeve. It's happened to me plenty. I guarantee it will happen again.
Fran Striker isn't remembered as "an art writer," a verbal craftsman. I don't see how he could have been, considering the speed at which he had to produce. They say that at one point in his career he was writing up to 156 scripts a year for the episodes of just one of his characters, the Lone Ranger! It takes my breath away. I write hard, but I can't write fast–not decently.
Striker seems to have lived mostly in Western New York, including in Buffalo, Arcade, and Elma. He mailed in those hastily typed scripts almost daily to far parts, including Trendle's Midwestern operations and, surely, Hollywood.
But don't throw Striker any shade. Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, the Green Hornet, Dr. Fang, or Warner Lester, Manhunter don't have to be Hamlet or Heathcliff to give you a sense of awe for the number of imaginations Striker's characters fired. How many millions gathered round the Art Deco-style appliances–some of them works of art!–for decades, spellbound by radios as if they were mechanical storytellers? How many minds ran rampant to the words and sounds?
It might be said that Striker's gift was to keep the child-mind's love of adventure and fantasy and mix it with the adult capacity for sustained effort. As far as his reputation as an entertainer, Striker seems to have received something short of the public adoration of Stephen King. I doubt many people of his day who considered themselves scholars or verbal artists had much appreciation for him.
It's nice to think of him eventually getting some respect as a writer. At 59 he was offered a job in the faculty of the University of Buffalo. He belonged there at least as much as some of the people they had, since he could do more than talk about writing. He knew how to get a career going.
It was as he was moving his family from a home in Arcade, NY, to Buffalo for this university job that he lost his life in a strange driving accident. It was on September 4, 1962. I hear it may have been around mid-afternoon, which seems a funny time of day not to see an oncoming car. I've done my best to research it.
We're accustomed to think that the full head-on crash is the worst, since the force of the vehicles is doubled and suddenly stopped. There is a worse one. I don't know what the term for it is, but it is when the cars meet head-on, but offset. Think of one set of headlights, for instance, meeting another. This concentrates both the vehicles' forces into only a narrow section of each hood. When it's a driver's side involved, the likelihood of a fatality is high. That's what happened with the creator of the Lone Ranger.
Yet a collision at that spot on that day seems so maddeningly improbable as to be fated.
Buffalo Road and Seneca Street are other names for Route 16. It generally follows an ancient Native footpath along water-routes in Western New York. It stops or ends–your choice–at the city of Buffalo, which is the meeting of the Buffalo Creek and the Niagara River. It meanders generally southward along the course of the Cazenovia Creek.
I've been over the spot of Striker's crash several times with the point of figuring out what could have happened. I can't think of any stretch of Route 16 in the Town of Elma that's either hilly or winding. The accident was reported to be north of Billington Road. Just north of that crossing at the route's meeting with West Blood Road, though, is a modest bend and a slight rise. Cars approaching ascend somewhat from both directions. They may not see each other, or realize that the road ahead of them will soon swerve just a bit. Someone from the south, let us say, who keeps going straight goes off the road. Someone coming, perhaps, from the north and stays on course crosses into oncoming traffic. Can that have been it? Ah well. For sure, one of the drivers nodded.
This route was also an escape-route out of the city on the terrible night in 1813–New Year's Eve–when the staggering refugees fled Buffalo's invasion and burning by the British. Until recently people in the village of East Aurora and the Town of Elma have reported apparitions that could possibly have been related. My last report of that was around 2000.
I wonder if this is a cursed section of the old footpath. It takes a lot more than a single crash that I'm lucky enough to hear about to make me reach that conclusion. But who knows what tradition the First Nations had about that region? We moved them out before we asked them all the questions I would have!
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