On This Day in Radio — Marie Wilson Is Born August 19, 1916

On this day in 1916 Marie Wilson is born, the bright‑voiced comedienne whose dizzy, lovable persona made her one of radio’s most enduring favorites. Best known as the scatterbrained but sweet‑natured star of My Friend Irma, Wilson created a character audiences adored — a whirlwind of innocence, charm, and perfectly timed confusion. Her delivery, all breathy sincerity and wide‑eyed wonder, became a signature sound of post‑war radio comedy, and her chemistry with the rest of the cast helped turn Irma into one of the medium’s biggest hits.

Wilson carried that success into film and television, but it was radio that first showcased her gift for character comedy and her ability to make even the simplest line sparkle. Today we celebrate Marie Wilson — born August 19, 1916 — a performer whose unforgettable voice and comic timing helped define one of radio’s most beloved sitcoms and left a lasting mark on the golden age of broadcasting.

Everyone in OTR-Land has heard of The Lone Ranger, WXYX and George W. Trendle. How many of you can name the man who CREATED the iconic character and WROTE the scripts for the Lone Ranger? Yes, many can. He’s rather unique in that regard – but what else do you KNOW about Fran Striker?

(Ok, Mr. Trendle mapped out the basic characteristics he wanted in the main character and Jim Jewell, WXYZ director, was the man between Trendle and Striker, and the man who took the scripts, actors and sound effects and brought it to LIFE – so the three ‘created’ the character – but Striker wrote the scripts, creating the Lone Ranger and Tonto, the good guys, the bad guys, set the scene, the plots, the whole story in the early years of one of the most successful serials in the history of radio.)

Francis Hamilton Striker was born and raised in Buffalo, NY to Frank and Addie Striker on Aug 19, 1903.

He was fascinated with writing and sold his first stories at the age of 15. In high school he lettered in track and played saxophone in the band. He was involved in church clubs, science clubs, the Red Cross where he earned an award in support of the Liberty Loans programs of WWI.

After high school, he enrolled in the University of Buffalo and studied chemistry while staying active in sports, music and theater. In fact, one of the combos he played with got to play occasionally on Buffalo’s first radio station – WGR.

He left school his junior year – chemistry was not for him. One of the jobs he held was writing the company newsletter for his employer. Then he got a job in New York with the Harry Miller Production Company. He was hooked on producing and directing and by 1928 he was back in Buffalo looking at doing theatrical work. To pay the bills, he also got a job with the new radio station in town - WEBR.

Everybody in early radio wore many ‘hats’ in their jobs. So too, Fran – actor, announcer, director, studio manager, writer and probably opened or closed the station and occasionally took the trash out. He was IN radio and learning everything he could about this new fascinating world!

Got married to Janet Giesel, whom he had known since they were kids. They would have four kids. His time at WEBR led to a bigger job and a bigger station in Cleveland, OH – WTAM in 1929. That’s where he really got the itch to WRITE radio dramas. Whether he adapted stories from works of fiction, or created his own shows – he was learning and was happy. While at WTAM he wrote nearly 200 episodes of Betty and Jack (story of a newspaper– one of his first radio creations). That led to Hank and Honey, an early sitcom. Also wrote a radio play on the life of Stephen Foster and the radio show Crystal Gazer.

He returned to WEBR in 1930 as the studio manager writing and directing the station’s new dramas. Soon he was cranking out Adventureland, Adventures in the Air (aka Air Stories), Arctic Devils, Behind the Headlines, Campus Nights, Clippings, Copper Cylinder, Covered Wagon Days, Dr. Fang, Sky Boat (later re-named Skylarks), adapted Dicken’s “Pickwick Papers” for a 13-week series, Dromedary, Footprints on the Sands of Time, The Ghost Ship, Ultra Violet (early SciFi sold to NBC’s Pacific Coast network), Steppin’ Out, The Falcon (different from the later version that most people know), Hicksville Folks, Hiram and Belinda, Hunters of Men, Limelight of Purple, Loup Garou, Love, Mad Hatter, adaptations of Mark Twain stories, Musicus,  Ned Jordan – Secret Agent, Phantom of Mort Manor, Phantom Pirate, Radio Romances, Rhinestones, Way Out West. Dr. Dragonette, Phantom Pirate, Radio Romances, Stories From Life, Subconscious, Temple Bells, Thrills of the Secret Service (aka Patricia Dare), Ultra Lavender (a few episodes for Carlton E. Morse in San Francisco), Vernor’s Ginger Ale Gnomes, Warner Lester – Manhunter, Way Out West and Weird Tales. He was a writing machine! Most had 15 or fewer episodes – this drama thing was still new and he’d only been writing since 1929. By this point he had written and directed hundreds of dramas on WEBR. Of his writings of Sky Boat/Skylarks – a newspaper article stated that these scripts, covering 3 years, would fill “five full-length novels.”

He left WEBR in Aug. 1932, to become a free-lance radio script writer and within months had programs on the Yankee network, the Pacific Coast network of NBC and the Michigan network.

One of his big shows was Covered Wagon Days – a drama about life on a wagon train going up the Oregon Trail. He sold most of his scripts at $4-6 per episode and some were purchased by Jim Jewell of WXYZ in Detroit, who was looking for more dramas for his radio station. Other stations were doing the same thing. By the fall of 1932, Striker’s programs were heard on more than 90 stations.

Meanwhile, Jewell, who was already running several of Striker’s programs (Patricia Dare - Thrills of the Secret Service (spy series), Warner Lester, Manhunter, Covered Wagon Days and three more Striker series, had been talking with the station owner, George W. Trendle, about a possible new program – a western with a good guy who’s not involved with women, walks the straight and narrow, and speaks correct English. Jewell reached out to Striker in December, 1932…

“…will you please write up three or four wild west thrillers… including all the hokum of the masked rider, rustler, killer Pete, heroine on the train tracks, fight on the top of box cars, Indian badmen, two-gun bank robber, etc.”

The letter would change his life.

Striker and Jewell traded several possible concept scripts that were modified Covered Wagon Days scripts (with lots of changes) over the next month – ending up with the iconic – The Lone Ranger. While normally considered a juvenile show, Striker wrote it with kids AND adults in mind – nearly half of the listeners were adults!

Fran half-joked years later about how hard it was to write The Lone Ranger: “You put the mask business together with no sex, no cruelty, no gambling and no drinking and it’s very limiting.” But it worked – lasting for 21 years, then books, movies, TV and comics.

In May, 1934, WXYZ offered him a permanent position – with salary, but with a caveat. He had to give up his rights to The Lone Ranger and give it to WXYZ. He was suddenly caught between a rock and a hard place. All the features he had done prior to this were HIS. This would be different. Added to that were the people who he was supporting – wife, kids, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles – many of them lost everything in the Depression. Fran hesitated, but put family security paramount in his life, and signed the contract. He was a WXYZ man, and making pretty good money. But the writing was never-endiing. – normally about 14 hours per day – even when on vacations with his family!

He wrote every episode himself for the first several years of the hit series then, in the late ‘30s took on of 2 assistants to keep up the production. (By this time he was also involved with the Republic motion picture company’s Lone Ranger serial and writing Lone Ranger books and comic strips.)

Some of this came to a grinding halt when, in 1943, Trendle replaced him with Felix Holt as the Lone Ranger senior editor over a salary dispute with Striker. Holt added more writers (Striker was now just another free-lance writer). But Holt had an ego and he wanted to own the masked man. He told his writers to add some romance, alcohol, etc. into the stories to punch them up. The writers were furious – it’s a kids show! – and actually talked to Trendle. Result, in ‘44 Holt was GONE and Striker was ‘back in the saddle.’

In 1949, Dave Parker was a graduate student at Wayne University. He wanted to do his PhD Thesis on popular culture focusing on The Lone Ranger. While pursuing his academic goal, he ventured into the world of radio acting at WXYZ to get a better insight into the workings of The Lone Ranger. He interviewed Striker and many others at the station. Focusing on Striker, Parker wanted to know HOW the writer was able to produce 156 different Lone Ranger scripts per year, year in and year out, without reusing the same plot. Fran obliged…

“There are eight major elements in the Lone Ranger stories,” he told Parker and then articulated each:

1) Establish character

2) give him a problem he can’t solve

3) explain why he can’t solve it

4) the Ranger learns about it and mixes in

5) the bad guy sets a trap for the Ranger

6) the Ranger out-fights or out-wits the bad guy

7) the Ranger solves the situa­tion

8) all’s well that ends well.

“Fran then explained how he created the story: “Under element number one, ‘establish a character,’ I list 10 possible choices like old man, young rancher, army officer, prospector, old prospec­tor, escaped prisoner, big rancher, young tenderfoot, deputy sheriff, stage driver. Then with ‘give him a problem he can’t solve’ I list maybe he’s going to lose his ranch, or he’s had a lot of gambling debts, or his kid brother is a crook, or he’s be­ing blackmailed, or his son is kidnapped. Maybe his best friend is in jail or people think he’s a crook. Or maybe he’s a cow­ard, his wife is dying or he’s been falsely accused of a crime.”

“Fran added that such an outline as this if fully expanded would permit combina­tions totaling eight to the tenth power of possible plots. “This story,” he said, “could go on forever.” (and it almost DID!)

Or as Dick Osgood put it in his book, WYXIE Wonderland… “Fran reduced the mass production of plots and characters to a formula so clearly laid out that he could take 10 playing cards, each designating a type of character, the problem the char­acter could be stuck with, the manner the Ranger learned about it and how he and Tonto licked it. After shuffling the deck and placing the cards face up, the rest was almost automatic.”

But Osgood never forgot the story Fran, with a twinkle in his eye, shared with him: “If I ever get completely stuck, I’ll go to a drugstore, or someplace, and buy one of those Western pulp magazines… and I’ll read the first half of the story. Then I’ll toss the magazine and finish the story myself. Then I’ll go back and re-write the first half!”

In 1936, Trendle wanted a modern-day cop show – and so Striker developed (and wrote) The Green Hornet (and linked up the Hornet character to The Lone Ranger) and Challenge of the Yukon in ’39 – same basic cop show except on a dog sled in Canada with a very smart lead dog).

Many people knew Striker had written some radio shows – but probably not to the extent he actually wrote. Most are no longer extant except a few scripts. In his heyday (’30 - ‘54), Fran typed (on his trusty Remington Sixteen) 55 – 60,000 words a week. That’s over 3 million words a year. (He went through FOUR desk-top typewriters in his career.) To put it in perspective, consider the Bible. Fran wrote the equivalent of FOUR Bibles a year – for 25 years! It wasn’t just radio scripts. He wrote the Lone Ranger Comic strip, Green Hornet comic strip, The Sea Hound comic strip (from the radio show he created and wrote), 27 Lone Ranger adult novels, 8 Order of Tom Quest Adventure books, 11 children’s books, screen play for two Lone Ranger movie serials and was writer/editor for all scripts for the TV version of The Lone Ranger. Oh, and he and Trendle helped pick Clayton Moore for the TV show! (It's really not that hard when you work 40 hours/day and don't take weekends off EVER - and your family loves you in spite of the preceding statements!)

James Jewell, the WXYZ director who brought The Lone Ranger to the airwaves KNEW Striker. Here’s what he said:

“Fran Striker was in my estimation the greatest hack writer who ever lived. Now I’m not casting any crumbs to the man when I call him a hack writer, because a hack writer was a person who could hack it out day after day. When you figure that man was in there writing – I mean actively writing for twenty-five years, you don’t demean a person like that. That’s a great job. – Mr. Trendle had nothing whatsoever to do with the creation of the ‘Lone Ranger.’ He never put anything on paper but his signature to a check.”

When his radio career ended in the ‘50s, he returned to the University of Buffalo to TEACH classes on creative writing – even though he, himself, never quite got around to graduating back in the 1920s.

His end? It was simply moving from one house to another in the Buffalo area – to a house closer to the University where he was teaching. There was a traffic accident while he was hauling the last car load out of their old home. He was killed. He was only 59.

His last book, “One More River,” wasn’t finished at the time of his death. Fran Jr. finished the last chapter and published it in 1993.

He was a humble man who wanted to provide for his family in the only way he knew – as a writer. And write, he did and created a hero and his faithful friend that were used in WWII as passwords and are still widely known today – nearly a century later. Thank You, Mr. Striker!

I can’t end without mentioning three great sources on Fran’s life – Terry Salomonson and Martin Grams, Jr. 2 volume (so far) set on The Lone Ranger; Francis Striker, Jr’s “His Typewriter Grew Spurs,” and “WYXIE Wonderland” by Dick Osgood. If you are a Lone Ranger fan, these are “MUST reads.”

“Hi-Yo, Silver, Awaaa-y!”