Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Updike's "Lone Ranger" Memory Piece

[From Rabbit Redux, page 22.]

They channel-hop, trying to find something to hold them, but there is nothing, it all slides past until nine, on Carol Burnett, she and Gomer Pyle do an actually pretty funny skit about the Lone Ranger. It takes Rabbit back to when he used to sit in the radio-listening armchair back on Jackson Road, its arms darkened with greasespots from the peanut butter crackers he used to stack there to listen with. Mom used to have a fit. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday night it came on at seven-thirty, and if it was a summer you'd come in from kick-the-can or three-stops-or-a-catch and the neighborhood would grow quiet all across the backyards and then at eight the doors would slam and the games begin again, those generous summer days, just enough dark to fit sleep into, a war being fought across oceans just so he could spin out his days in such happiness, in such quiet growing. Eating Wheaties.


I caught the very end of the so-called radio days, listening to The Lone Ranger during its last summer of broadcast....1954 in Great Falls Montana....in the kitchen of the house shown below.


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112 8th Street North. The Old Parsonage.

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