David Piel

David Joseph Piel (1923 – May 6, 2004) was an American actor, television director, and producer whose work in children's television programming earned him particular recognition. A grandson of Piels Beer founder Michael Piel and the youngest son of opera singer Loretto Scott and Piels Beer president William F.J. Piel, he was raised in New York City and Salisbury, Connecticut. His younger brother was science writer and publisher Gerard Piel. Piel attended The Taft School before enrolling at Yale, where he graduated in 1947, his studies having been interrupted by World War II.

During the war, Piel served with the United States Marines, though substandard eyesight kept him from combat duty. He instead worked as a war correspondent and occasional sketch artist, seeing action at Okinawa during Operation Iceberg, one of the Pacific campaign's most costly engagements. A series of sketches he produced there — documenting a wounded soldier's passage from the battlefield to a hospital bed — was later used in blood donation appeals directed at civilians on the home front. Following the war, in August 1948, Boxoffice reported that Piel and two other New Yorkers had launched a multi-media production company called Ray Films. By the fall of 1949, he had relocated to Reno, Nevada, where he worked first as an announcer and later as a reporter at radio station KOLO.

Piel's television career took shape in the mid-1950s. By April 1956, the New York Herald Tribune had noted the formation of David Piel Inc. and identified its founder as the creator, producer, and director of a series of animated "Story Films" airing on CBS, which were enjoying repeat runs on Captain Kangaroo. He ultimately produced and directed nearly fifty of these limited-animation films for the program. Piel also directed the first screen adaptation of Crockett Johnson's picture book Harold and the Purple Crayon. A finished version of the film was screened in October 1957 for Johnson, his wife and collaborator Ruth Krauss, and representatives of Harper Books; it was released by Brandon Films in 1959. Additionally, Piel created the semi-animated television series Big Mac and His Magic Train, for which his second wife, Hedwig "Hedi" Seligsohn, served as co-writer of the titular theme song alongside Chet Gierlach and Leonard Whitcup.

His stage work included a Broadway appearance in 1968 in Joseph Heller's We Bombed in New Haven. On screen, he appeared in the 1988 film Killer Klowns from Outer Space, in the role of a security guard.

Piel's first marriage, to Leslie Semple Fellner in 1946, ended in divorce three years later. He then married German-born writer Hedwig Seligsohn, who became Vice President of David Piel Inc. That marriage produced two children, a daughter named Candida and a son named Geoffrey. On May 2, 1980, in Burlington, Vermont, Piel married Doloris Rudolph, née Adams. The couple later moved to San Francisco's Marina District and subsequently to Carson City, Nevada, where in 1993 Piel published Pogonip & Mule Ears: A Souvenir Book.

Piel died on May 6, 2004, following a brief illness, at his home in Carson City at the age of 80. He was survived by his wife, Dee, his children Candida and Geoffrey, stepchildren John and Paula Randolph, and two grandchildren.