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George Baldwin Dessart (born August 27, 1925) is an American television producer and executive and served as national chairman of the American Cancer Society from 1996-98.

Dessart began his career in television at WCAU in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and was the producer of What in the World. His career at CBS as Vice President of Program Practices ended in 1985.

According to Lloyd Morrisett, George Dessart was one of the first candidates to be considered for the position of executive producer of Sesame Street:

“The executive producer was, from the creative point of view, obviously key. We puttogether a list of candidates and George Dessart was our first candidate and the one wereally went after. We tried to recruit him very strongly. George thought about it, andfinally he told us that he just wasn't right for it. We were really despondent over thatdecision. He was exactly right. He probably would have been terrible. He was a fineproducer, but for this job, he was not right for it although we thought he was.”

In Michael Davis’ 2008 book, Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street, Dessart is credited with the suggestion to use a commercial format (e.g., “Sesame Street is brought to you by the letter “P” and the number “2”) to “sell” letters and numbers to children.

Dessart’s wife, Nancy Godfrey Dessart died in 1991.

George Dessart is professor emeritus at Brooklyn College and currently resides in San Francisco, California. He has two children and two grandchildren.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "George Dessart", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0