John Lyman Meston was an American scriptwriter best known for co-creating with producer Norman Macdonnell the long-running Western series Gunsmoke.
16 Facts About John Meston
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John Meston developed storylines and wrote radio scripts and teleplays for 379 episodes for the series, which was first broadcast on CBS Radio in 1952, and then adapted to the "small screen", as well, airing on television from 1955 to 1975.
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John Meston was born in Colorado in 1914, the youngest of three children of Irene and George D Meston, who was an investment and loan specialist in Pueblo.
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Federal census records suggest that young John Meston grew up in a financially comfortable household, one that was at least prosperous enough by 1920 to afford a live-in "servant".
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Station KNX by the 1940s already served as the center of West Coast operations for the entire CBS Radio network, so John Meston's next career move was a transitional one to CBS, where in 1947, he began working as a censor, more specifically in the network's program practices department.
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John Meston contributed scripts as well to installments of Suspense and Lux Radio Theater, yet two more of CBS Radio's lineup of notable programs during the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s.
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Once given the go-ahead to continue preproduction and begin casting, John Meston added details to several projected storylines and refined the main characters who would populate Macdonnell and his radio portrayal of Dodge.
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The premiere episode, "Billy the Kid", was not written by John Meston; it was written by Walter Brown Newman, another experienced author of radio plays for CBS.
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John Meston's engaging plots and realistic dialogue continued to distinguish Gunsmoke from the array of other Westerns being broadcast on both radio and television.
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John Meston wrote scripts for Gunsmoke for 13 years, although the bulk of his stories were for episodes originally broadcast on radio and television during the 1950s.
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The final radio episode, "Letter of the Law", was written too by John Meston but aired as a rerun on June 18,1961.
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John Meston's writing and film projects outside the realms of CBS radio and television productions are to date not as well documented as his work on Gunsmoke.
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John Meston did, though, write for some other film studios and television networks.
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John Meston composed at least 200 television scripts over the years, but he received only a single consideration for an Emmy Award.
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In March 1979, John Meston died at age 64 from a cerebral hemorrhage in Tarzana, California.
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John Meston was survived by his wife Mary Ann and his daughter, Feather, from his marriage to Rosemary Carver.