[5] Later, Albert moved the short distance to Berkeley, where in 1920 he was serving as city editor of the local newspaper, a position that may have influenced Marian early in life and prompted her later as a young woman to venture into radio journalism as a profession.
[7] Due to the shortage of "manpower" on the home front in the United States during World War II, new job opportunities were opening to women in a wide variety of fields, including radio broadcasting.
The station's department heads taught classes to prepare workshop participants for assorted positions available in radio, such as news writers, transcription operators, mailroom clerks, and publicity managers.
[11] Once she had given Clark some basic instruction on scriptwriting, Hite introduced her to Norman Macdonnell, a producer and director for popular CBS Radio productions, such as Suspense, Doorway to Life, Escape, and a weekly series he and writer John Meston had recently developed.
[12] Their new "adult Western", Gunsmoke, consisted of Old West stories set in the 1870s in southwestern Kansas, principally centered in the rowdy, "hard-drinking" cattle town of Dodge City.
[14] In addition to Gunsmoke's regular cast of voice actors—William Conrad, Parley Baer, Howard McNear, and Georgia Ellis—that episode features Vic Perrin and John Dehner as guest stars in a story about a wayward son's clash with his father.
[22] With Hollywood productions of the "Old West" historically dominated by male characters, and in a 1950s television industry dominated by male writers, Clark proved to be a quick study in the Western genre, demonstrating a remarkable ability in her writing to identify with and credibly portray on paper the lives of cattle drovers, buffalo hunters, farmers, the displaced native people of Kansas, as well as the assorted inhabitants of Dodge City in the 1870s.
[9] Her storylines for Gunsmoke are quite diverse thematically, although approximately one-quarter of her scripts focus to varying degree on women, dealing with their isolation and physical struggles on prairie homesteads and with the emotional conflicts they faced within the given social structure of the latter nineteenth century.
[23] Her writings, as do other early scripts in the series, address directly or within the bounds of the network's contemporary standards and practices such sensitive issues as domestic violence, mental illness, filicide, rape, prostitution, racial and cultural discrimination, and alcoholism.
For his 30-minute black-and-white teleplays based on Clark's writing and for one of his 60-minute episodes developed from her work, he adjusted some original dialogue and specified needs for set content, surrounding landscapes, livestock, clothing and firearms for cast, and other details required for stories now being presented in a visual format.
The two stories by Clark not adapted by Meston—"The Summons" (1962) and "The Cousin" (1963)—were done by her colleague and friend Katherine Hite after the expansion of Gunsmoke's episodes to an hour at the start of televised series' seventh season.
Her credits (or lack thereof) throughout the radio series were determined by reviewing closing acknowledgments of the original broadcast recordings, which are generally available at online sharing services, including YouTube.