Saturday nights at 6 o'clock

I had heroes when I was a kid. On Saturday nights at six o'clock Sis and I ate our supper in the tiny living room. The arms of the overstuffed chairs were wide enough to balance our plates. It was the only time that Nanoo would let us eat a meal anywhere other than the kitchen table. We watched the Lone Ranger in front of the floor model tv that Gramp bought. He worked a second job to buy it, and the new dark green Pontiac that soon smelled of his Camel cigarettes.

On the screen he rode across the plains with a cloud of dust at the speed of light, up that hill where his horse Silver rose up on his two hind legs, and the Lone Ranger shouted "Hi Yo Silver, away." Tonto, his sidekick and faithful friend was always close by, on his palomino , Scout. You knew they would bring law and order to any town they rode into, where outlaws were trying to steal cattle from a young rancher, his wife and 3 kids, or plan a bank robbery and blame it on the bearded old man shoeing horses. And at the end of the show when the bad guys were put in jail, the husband would say to his wife , "who was that masked man," and their kids who knew all along, would answer, "he's the Lone Ranger."

Sis and I knew that when we went to bed this hero of ours, wearing a white hat, a black mask and riding a white horse was going to take care of us, that we would have no bad guys coming to get us, that we could go to sleep and have no nightmares, only the stomach ache we got every Sunday morning when we had to go to church, and that was followed by the Monday stomach ache when we had to go to school and face the nuns for another week. All we had to do was wait til next Saturday at 6 o'clock to eat our beans and hot dogs in the living room with the Lone Ranger.