Milburn Stone
Born July 5, 1904
Died June 12, 1980
In 1954, when I was born, my family didn't have a television. At least that was what I was told. Being an infant at the time, I don't really remember. We didn't have a TV until a couple of years after I was born, I guess. My brother and sister tell me our family used to drive over to my grandparents' house, the big house on the farm, about a half mile away from where the family lived, to watch TV for a couple of hours and then pack back up and go back across the fields to a little house that my father had had built when he and my mother got married in 1942.
By the time of my first memories, when I was three or so, we had our own television. And I remember watching one show in particular, Gunsmoke. It was the dawn of the age of the TV western. Gunsmoke was one of many. First shown in half-hour episodes, it followed four primary characters: Marshal Matt Dillon, his deputy Chester Goode (later replaced by a cousin, Festus Haggen), Longbranch saloon gal Kitty Russell, and crusty old Doc Adams, whose job it was to patch Matt up whenever some bad guy would get the drop on him. This last character was played by Milburn Stone, an actor who had been in movies since the mid-thirties, but this would be the role with which he would be forever connected. And it's his birthday I'm highlighting in this post.
I referred to him as "old" Doc Adams, though when the show started, he was really not so old; just entering his fifties. He stayed with it for almost the entire run of the series, which was over 20 years.
Some info on Mr. Stone I found when researching this... Milburn was born in a little town called Burrton, Kansas, a little more than 100 miles from the setting of the show, Dodge City. Gunsmoke had been a popular radio serial for years before transferring with a whole new cast to the small screen, and Stone thought the radio actor should continue the role of Adams on the tube, so he almost turned down the part. I'm pretty happy he got talked into taking the role, as he turned the doctor into my favorite character on the show, picking up an Emmy and a Golden Globe in the process.
Peace to all who happen upon this blog, happy 4th, and whatever happened to doctors making house calls?
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