David Ackles - Personal Life

Personal Life

After leaving Columbia Records in 1973, Ackles concentrated on fulfilling his publishing contract with Warner Bros., writing songs to order for the company's artists. As had been the case in Ackles's early Elektra days, none of the songs were recorded by the artists to whom they were pitched. He worked on musical theater and screenplays from the home base he shared with his wife and son, a six-acre horse farm in Tujunga, near Los Angeles. He sold some screenplays to television; one that was broadcast was Word of Honor (1981) starring Karl Malden and Ron Silver.

In 1981 his car was hit by a drunk driver. Ackles's left arm was nearly severed and his left thighbone "virtually pushed out through his back." He remembered his wife "standing outside the operating theater, shouting, 'Don't cut off his arm! He's a piano player!'" He spent six months in a wheelchair, eventually receiving a steel hip. Though by 1984 he was able to play piano for short periods, his arm's nerves never recovered, and he "may have been in considerable pain for the rest of his life."

In the 1980s he returned to USC, first in administration, then teaching musical theater. At USC in 1997 he directed productions of Good News and The Threepenny Opera, and in the 1990s completed Sister Aimee, a musical based on the life of Aimee Semple McPherson, which was performed in Los Angeles in 1995 and in Chicago in 2004. He and Rob Dickins of Warner Music UK discussed recording Sister Aimee. He was the executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Society of Fund-Raising Executives (now the National Association of Fundraising Professionals) and was a part of the Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop in Los Angeles (now the Academy of New Musical Theatre).

Ackles died of lung cancer on March 2, 1999, at the age of 62.