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A Journalist’s Tribute to Mel Gabler 12/21/2004 George Archibald, education reporter for The Washington Times, honors Mel Gabler, a pioneer in improving schools and textbooks. I was highly honored this evening when Jim Gabler, Mel and Norma Gabler's oldest son, telephoned and asked me in Norma's behalf to be a pall-bearer at Mel's funeral service on Wednesday, December 22, in Longview, Texas, east of Dallas, near the northwest Louisiana border and Shreveport.
So I'm on my way.
What an honor it will be to help carry this man's earthly remains to and from the church service and to is grave. Then back home for Christmas with my family.
The Mel so many of us knew was a marvelous, gentle man, who with Norma pushed for factually correct and historically-true textbooks for more than four decades.
Mel, age 90, fell at his home on Friday, hit his head and afterwards suffered a massive brain hemorrhage, and died Sunday afternoon, December 19, 2004.
I had a great conversation with him just 10 days ago by telephone about school and textbook matters, and he was his same genial, lucid self -- the wonderful man I
have known for 30-plus years -- full of enthusiasm for the continuing fight ahead to improve education and school textbooks.
Mel and Norma were the seeds of a veritable parent revolution for school improvement who used the Texas process for textbook adoption to press their case for accuracy and fairness in teaching our country's heritage -- all of it -- to our children. They stood almost alone for decades in building a grassroots parent movement in favor of textbooks and school curriculum that upheld decent social standards, basic principles of decentralized government that safeguard every person's individual freedom, the religious basis of our society that the liberal-left nihilists have tried so hard to censor from teaching and learning in our schools, and basic academic freedom and honesty.
For decades, they and their allies questioned public school practices from a Christian conservative point of view. Mel and Norma stood against a self-proclaimed “religion” that called itself “secular humanism,” which through academic and education establishment proponents worked itself into K-12 school curriculum and textbooks in the 1960s and '70s.
Well-financed advocates of secular humanism took on the Gablers, attacked them in professional educator publications, books written by college professors and graduate students, and in federally-funded congressional studies and testimony, but did not beat them.
I met Mel and Norma in the early 1970s, even stayed at their home on several occasions as a congressional staffer working on a national curriculum controversy, and they have been dear friends ever since. They were the subject of a 1976 book, Textbooks on Trial, by James C. Hefley (Victor Books). Their inscription in my copy noted a favorite and, for them, missionary Biblical passage, Proverbs 22:6 – “Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it.”
Jim Hefley wrote a second book about Mel and Norma in 1979, Are Textbooks Harming Your Children. Both books told how the couple started their work in the early 1960s after son Jim brought home a U.S. history textbook with more pictures of Marilyn Monroe than content about George Washington.
Hefley quoted Norma in the 1979 book as saying to Jim: “You started it all. What do you think of us now?” Jim responded: “You make a good team. I am convinced God gave you the mouth and Dad the brains.”
I will sadly miss Mel Gabler. He was a spirit after my own heart and that of my father, who lost his American citizenship, his birthright, to bureaucratic government indolence after landing at Normandy on D-Day and fighting with the British Army against the
Nazis for six years during World War II.
Our prayers are with Norma, Mel's wife and partner of more than 50 years, and their sons, Jim and Paul, and their families.
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