Robert Vincent Wright, 88; writer for TV’s ‘Maverick,’ ‘Bonanza’

Robert Vincent Wright, 88, a longtime television writer whose credits included “Maverick,” “Bonanza” and “Lost in Space,” died of acute bronchitis and pneumonia June 17 at Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks.

In 1958, Wright was nearly 40 years old and the supervisor of motion pictures in the engineering division of what was then known as the Boeing Airplane Co. in Seattle when he wrote his first TV script, an episode of “Maverick.”

An agent dropped off the script with one of the show’s producers at Warner Bros. Studios on a Friday afternoon. On the next Monday, the agent called Wright to say that his script had not only sold but also would be shot as written.

After producing films at Boeing with such titles as “Thrust Considerations of Solid State Fuels,” the Seattle-born Wright moved to Van Nuys with his wife and two sons and went on to write nearly 100 TV episodes of shows including “77 Sunset Strip,” “Surfside 6,” “Gunsmoke,” “The Wild Wild West,” “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” “Fantasy Island” and “Little House on the Prairie.”

Wright, who served as story editor on “Bonanza” for a period in the 1970s, also co-wrote the 1969 movie “The Thousand Plane Raid.”