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Obituary: Willian Biel
Friday, 05 February 2010
William Biel
William Biel, former English teacher and track and field coach at Great Neck South Senior High School and English professor at Hofstra University, passed away at age 82 on Jan. 24, 2010. After his retirement from teaching, he continued to coach track at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and Garden City High School.
Born in Canton, OH, he starred in football and basketball in high school and played for Ohio State and Northwestern Universities. He went to the 1949 Rose Bowl with his Norhtwestern team. As a young man, he was a camper, counselor and mountain guide at Camp Paradox in the Adirondacks.
He leaves behind his wife and three children and a lifetime of devotion to his students and his profession. Donations may bemade i his homor to the Special Olympics, www.specialolympics.org, 202-824-0307
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Roger Hirschland
Mr. Biel had a tremendous influence on my learning, my thinking, my speaking, and then my own teaching and editing, through his passionate devotion to the study and teaching of general semantics. His classes were delightfully entertaining and challenging. My whole family adopted his means of analysis of speech and thought, labeling our dinnertime conversation as reports, inferences, judgments, or generalizations, thanks to Mr. Biel's teaching.
I maintained contact with Bill Biel and his wife, Gerry, over the years and visited from time to time. He was always energetic, enthusiastic, funny -- and disbelieving, in later years, that his own former student could be in his 60s. After all, he wasn't that much older than we were when he began teaching in Great Neck. I think he was grateful to know what a huge influence he'd been.
We've lost one of the best with Bill Biel's passing.