Colored Children’s Author Leonard Kessler has died at the age of 101.


Mr. Kessler was usually inspired every day. For example, the hungry feelings of a toddler going to the supermarket are magnified in “Crunch Crunch” (1955), the sequel to “Plink Plink,” a book about feeling thirsty.

He once told an interviewer that he did a lot by crawling on the floor to give a child’s perspective on things. His younger son Paul asked him, “Do baby bears sit on chairs?” when he asked. “I don’t know, but that’s a great name for a book,” said Mr. Kessler. (“Do Baby Bears Sit on Chairs?” came out in 1961.)

“The Big Red Bus,” about a bus landing in a ditch and battering traffic, was chosen as one of them by The New York Times. best picture books for children It was a 1990 Times crossword clue (“’Big Red Bus’ Author,” 5 Down).

Credit…through the Kessler family

Leonard Cecil Kessler was born on October 28, 1920 in Akron, Ohio. His father, Albert Lewis Kessler, was a plumber; her mother, Lillian (Rabinowitz) Kessler, was a nursing assistant. Leonard grew up in Pittsburgh in a neighborhood of European immigrants, where he met his wife-to-be Ethel Gerson. They married in 1946, when he returned from World War II. He had served as an intelligence scout in France and Germany, crawling behind enemy lines after dark, reporting on their positions, which he delivered in atmospheric sketches.

Planning to become an artist, he attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh at GI Bill and shared studio space with returning soldiers and the very shy 18-year-old Andy Warhola. After graduating with a BFA in 1949, Mr. Kessler and his wife moved to Manhattan.

A few years later, in 1953, the Kessler family decided to rent their flat to Mr. Warhola (who at the time had changed his last name to Warhol), who needed a bigger place: his mother, Julia, was coming to live with him. Along with his 25 cats, all named Sam.



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