Valley Actor Liked Playing ‘Good Guy’

As a child, Clayton Moore wanted to be either a cowboy or a police officer. As the Lone Ranger, he got to be both.

Moore first rode into America’s living rooms in 1949 in his television role as the “daring and resourceful masked rider of the Plains.” With a commanding cry of, “Hi yo, Silver!,” the Lone Ranger and his faithful Indian companion, Tonto, brought justice to the Wild West.

Already a fan of the Lone Ranger radio series that started in 1933, Moore beat out 75 other actors for the role. The show was the first western made for television. Until the Lone Ranger, television’s cowboy shows were merely segments cut out of feature films.

“Once I got the Lone Ranger role, I didn’t want any other,” Moore, a longtime Calabasas resident, said in a 1985 Times interview. “I like playing the good guy. I’ll wear the white hat for the rest of my life. The Lone Ranger is a great character, a great American. Playing him made me a better person.”

Long after the TV program, Moore continued to play the part of the cowboy justice crusader at various public events, shooting blanks from his Colt .45s and teaching his fans about honesty, law and order and respect.

The Wrather Corp., which owned the rights to the Lone Ranger character, obtained a court order in 1979 to prevent Moore from appearing at public functions in costume. The company didn’t want anyone mistaking Moore for Klinton Spilsbury, star of “The Legend of the Lone Ranger,” a film released in 1981 that flopped at the box office.

Moore regained the right to wear his treasured Lone Ranger mask after a five-year legal battle.

Now 82, Moore received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1987 and three years later was inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame’s Hall of Great Western Performers.