Very sad news: Fred Foy has died

[radioskeptic]

Tom Taylor reports this morning that Fred Foy has died. Fred was the announcer for The Lone Ranger and Sgt. Preston on radio, as well as for The Lone Ranger on TV. He was later Dick Cavett's announcer on Dick's ABC network show.

Fred was one of a kind, the very best at what he did.

See http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/lone-ranger-announcer-fred-foy-64971 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oFSzPR56Pk

 

[Cincinnati Kid]

Sorry to hear of this. He had a truly-great voice. Actually, the Long Ranger radio shows prior to Fred's narraration were not as good as those after he started doing them. I saw him at an old time radio convention here a few years back. At that, he read the part of the Ranger during a re-created radio show, titled "Burly Scott's Sacrafice". R.I.P.

 

[MattParker]

I, too, am a long time admirer of Fred Foy. He had a long life and a great career in his chosen field. God bless him.

One correction: Others have written that Fred Foy narrated the TV Lone Ranger. Actually, the narrator of the TV version was Gerald Mohr. The TV show went into production in 1949, one year after Fred Foy began narrating the radio show and was not yet established as THE voice of the program. When George W. Trendell sold the show to Jack Wrather in 1955, Wrather had Foy record the opening, which was used in the final seasons and when the show went into syndication.

 

[radioskeptic]

Gerald Mohr's distinctly New York accent, not the most appropriate thing for a western, is nothing like Fred Foy's quintessentially American sound.

Mohr did indeed narrate the early episodes, but the opening of the show, from the beginning in 1949, was the one taped by Fred Foy back in Detroit -- as the NYT obit today confirms:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/arts/television/23foy.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Fred Foy&st=cse

But you don't need any confirmation from the newspaper of record. You can hear the difference for yourself:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/84787/the-lone-ranger-enter-the-lone-ranger#x-0,vepisode,1,0

BTW, there's a widespread myth that Mike Wallace did the early narration. While Wallace did do a lot of radio shows, he never did The Lone Ranger. (And Wallace's accent, what little is left of it, is from Massachusetts, not New York City.)

 

[MattParker]

@Skeptic: Mohr did the opening narration in the original ABC network run and the Saturday morning CBS run before 1955. Foy's recording replaced Mohr's in the earlier Black and White epsides in off-network syndication (except for season one when the second part of the opening was specific for each episode).

The Times, like all newspapers, repeats what has been written elsewhere. When Walter Cronkite died, their obit included the false factoid that news presenters in Sweeden are called Cronkiters (or some variation).

I would not consider Mohr's accent even indistinctly New York (although he was born there) and he often played characters in Westerns.