Buddy Reardon: In Pursuit of the Lone Ranger

Buddy Reardon in Pursuit of the Lone Ranger spans thirty-three hours in the life of eleven-year-old Buddy Reardon in the late summer of 1950. It is not a sentimental lollipop. It is basic storytelling--an intimate portrayal of a third generation Irish American boy from a working class family who lives in a northern suburb of Fenway Park. It is a world where people get their news from gossip and the radio--a world where people have not yet learned, through television, how not to be themselves. Buddy Reardon is an imaginative, canny, often dreamy kid, with an ironic sense of humor, who rarely sees things from a conventional or knee-jerk perspective. For him, 'center field' is the center of the known universe, and the Lone Ranger is his spiritual guide and mentor in a confusing pre-sixties world. Negotiating survival with his unwitting family, Buddy maneuvers like a caveman stalking an unpredictable woolly mammoth. He stalks, humors, baits and evades his rough-hewn father, Jack Reardon, his manipulative mother, Dot Reardon, and his unsympathetic fourteen-year-old sister Janey. When family plans threaten his destined rendezvous with a special Lone Ranger Anniversary Radio Show, (in which the Lone Ranger himself is to appear, unmasked), Buddy resorts to secretive, unusual, even bizarre tactics. He will allow nothing to stand between him and that show.