Donald A Pels

Mr. Pels was a media executive on the rise as the chief financial officer of Capital Cities Communications Corporation when, in 1969, the board of Lin Broadcasting, a troubled company, asked him to look at it and make recommendations. The board liked his ideas so much that Mr. Pels was invited to take over the company. He was its chairman and president for the next 20 years. By the end of the decade, as cellphones were becoming smaller and more popular, Lin held significant stakes in the licenses covering New York, Los Angeles, Houston and a few other markets, thanks to Mr. Pels’s faith in the future of wireless communication. In a bidding contest between BellSouth and the upstart McCaw Cellular in 1989, McCaw won, and bought a controlling interest in Lin in a deal valued at more than $3 billion. (In 1993, AT&T agreed to buy McCaw Cellular for more than $12 billion.) Mr. Pels’s personal profit on the McCaw deal was estimated at nearly $175 million because of his 3 percent ownership stake in the company and stock options. He graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and earned a law degree at New York University. Besides his wife, Wendy Keys, and his daughter Valerie, Mr. Pels is survived by another daughter, Juliette Meeus; a son, Laurence; a sister, Betty Schwartz; and four grandchildren.