Bill Persky

Persky was born to a Jewish family, the son of an estate auctioneer.[1] His father would travel between various resort towns where the wealthy lived to conduct estate auctions.[1] He has one older sister, Bunny Persky Grossinger and attended Ramble Elementary School in Hot Springs, Arkansas.[1] During the summers, he worked as a lifeguard in the Borscht Belt in the Catskill Mountains.[1] He attended Syracuse University, where he studied advertising, and after school went to work for an advertising agency in New York City.[1] He then took a job at WNEW where he met Sam Denoff where they wrote jokes for the DJs out of fun which soon morphed into part of their job tasks.[1] The writing team moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, taking a job to write for The Steve Allen Show.[1]

With his long-time collaborator Sam Denoff, he wrote and created the television show That Girl starring Marlo Thomas as well as Good Morning World starring Joby Baker and Ronnie Schell. Their writing collaboration on episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show resulted in some of the show's most popular episodes. He also directed 100 episodes of the situation comedy Kate and Allie. He also directed the situation comedies The Practice (1976) and Busting Loose (1977) and the movie Serial.

Persky has been married three times. He has three daughters with his first wife: neuropsychologist Dana Persky, restaurateur Jamie Persky, and television producer Liza Persky. His third wife is New York advertising executive, Joanna Patton.[1]

• An interview with Bill Persky, March 2011
• Audio interview with Bill Persky, July 2014
• Bill Persky on IMDb
• Bill Persky at The Interviews: An Oral History of Television