Kathleen Hite

A pioneer for female screenwriters, Kathleen Hite had an extraordinary career that took her into the writer's rooms for some of the biggest shows of the 1960s and 1970s, including "Gunsmoke" and "The Waltons." After completing her degree at the University of Wichita, Hite worked at the Kansas radio station KANS until 1950. She then left for Los Angeles where she landed a job as a secretary at CBS. Her talents saw her quickly ushered into the network's creative fold with a job as their first female staff writer. Though she began on mostly unmemorable series, she was soon turning out scripts for "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and the long-running western "Wagon Train" by 1959. Shows about life on the frontier quickly became her forte. Hite was given the opportunity of a lifetime when she was hired on the seminal TV western "Gunsmoke." She scripted over 40 episodes of the series, which dealt with law and order in Dodge City during the settlement of the American West. From here she drifted into some unsuccessful series until Hite began on "The Waltons," about a Depression-era mountain family, where she wrote 25 episodes near the end of the show's long run. After some brief work on the evening soap "Falcon Crest" in the early 1980s, Hite retired, leaving a strong legacy for female TV writers to come.