Rode Into the Sunset

The three top television westerns were Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, and Have Gun Will Travel.  Gunsmoke featured Marshal Matt Dillon, modeled on Wyatt Earp.  Howard McNear played morbid Doc Charles Adams:  He died of a stroke in 1969 at age sixty-three.  Georgia Ellis was the prostitute Kitty Russell on Gunsmoke:  She died in 1988 at age seventy-one of AIDS, acquired after she married a bisexual younger husband.  Wagon Train was a weekly drama portraying a clean-cut version of post-Civil War America’s journey westward, featuring Ward Bond as Major Seth Adams.  He died in 1960 at age fifty-seven of a heart attack.  Have Gun Will Travel was about a professional gunfighter named Paladin, played by Richard Boone and Kim “Hey Boy” Chan by Kam Tong:  Boone holstered his six-shooter for a good as a result of cancer in 1981 at age sixty-three.  Tong bowed out a sixty-two, going in 1969 of heart failure.