Ramsey took great pride in being the Black Lone Ranger. He was not playing a role. It was his life. He slept in his boots and claimed that he even showered with his mask on. The Ranger's guns were real and he owned a white horse named Trigger. Ramsey kept the animal on a farm south of Chicago.
The Black Lone Ranger was the perfect mix of light-heartedness and dedication to an ideal. In fact, Ramsey was such a hardcore Ranger that he found himself unable to respect perhaps the world's most well-known of Lone Rangers, Clayton Moore. He felt Moore lacked dedication.
"Clayton Moore didn't wear his mask except when he was doing the (television) show," the Ranger told Rocktober Magazine in 1996. "I will never (remove) my mask every day and every night until I go home!"
James Ramsey was born Feb. 1,1932, in Jackson, Miss. He later moved to Denver, Colo., and began working as a ranch hand at his uncle's horse farm. He quickly fell in love with his new life on the open range and adopted the lifestyle of a cowboy. He was the Lone Ranger for more than 40 years.
"It was like this," he told me in a 1994 conversation. "I listened at the radio all the time and every evening was the Lone Ranger. My idea was to be the Black Lone Ranger, so I made me a mask out a black jacket and I put it on and wore it around out there in the country -- way out in the country. My uncle was a sheriff at the time and he took me to town. I had my mask on and the big men said, 'Hey, what is this? The Lone Ranger?' He said, 'This is my nephew, the Black Lone Ranger. So all along, men would ask me the question, 'How do I feel as the Black Lone Ranger?' I told 'em, 'I feel fine.'"
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