The Brains Behind "Gunsmoke"

TV Western fans who are regular followers of "Gunsmoke" might find a surprising similarity between Marshal Matt Dillon, hero of this popular series, and lanky John L. Meston '37. This resemblance would not be merely accidental since Meston is the creator and writer of "Gunsmoke" and his wife and friends claim that he strongly resembles Dillon both physically and in personality. People sometimes stop him on the street thinking he is actor James Arness who plays Marshal Dillon on the CBS-TV weekly series.

Meston, like his hero, is tall, husky and sandy-haired; and he has no lack of background for writing westerns. He grew up in Colorado and is at home riding a horse or roping a calf. Although he loved the West, Meston came east to Dartmouth, studied in France after graduation, and was working on a Harvard Ph.D. thesis on the 17th-century French symbolists when World War II came along and interrupted things. After his war service he joined CBS radio as a story editor and had a hand in producing the original "Gunsmoke" that started out on radio. This is the radio series' eighth year of existence and Meston still supervises the scripts.

When "Gunsmoke" began, Meston claims they were determined to avoid every cliche of the grade B western movies. Everything was done the opposite way - plot, language and especially character. Marshal Dillon has been made a fallible human being, and he has been out-talked, out-drawn, out-shot, and out-just-about-everything during the history of the program.

"It's not easy," says Meston, "but we keep trying."

Recently wed to the celebrated lady bullfighter Betty Ford, Meston and his wife have gone to Spain for the year where he still regularly writes his "Gunsmoke" scripts while working on a biography of his wife on the side.