Mel Gabler, 89; Influenced Public School Textbooks

Mel Gabler, a small-town Texan who exerted an outsize influence on the textbooks that American elementary and secondary schools adopt, died Dec. 19 at a hospital in Tyler, Texas. He suffered a massive brain hemorrhage after a fall at his home two days earlier. He was 89.

For more than 40 years, Gabler and his wife, Norma, pored over textbook publishers’ offerings looking for factual errors and examples of what they deemed liberal bias.

Because Texas public schools make up the second-largest textbook market in the nation, behind California, and Texas books are selected statewide rather than by individual districts, publishers often made their Texas offerings the template for the rest of the nation. And those books bore the unofficial Gabler seal of approval.

The Gablers, who began their work in 1961 after finding errors in one of their sons’ textbooks, came to recognize that they could have a powerful influence over the books the nation’s schoolchildren would read.

At their kitchen table, they founded Educational Research Analysts to examine textbooks eligible for adoption. They soon became well-known statewide, often testifying before the Texas state Board of Education and confronting publishers with their objections. After a few years, they were lecturing and making appearances across the country.

Last month, the Gablers’ research group led a successful effort in Texas to force textbook publishers to define marriage as a lifelong union between a man and a woman. The group had objected to the term “married partners.”

In 1973, the Gablers noted that a U.S. history book they reviewed devoted six pages to Marilyn Monroe and only a few paragraphs to George Washington. A few years later, Gabler contended that textbooks were indoctrinating children with a philosophy of humanism not in keeping with mainstream America.

He also protested the influence of the women’s liberation movement, which, he said, had “totally distorted male and female roles, making the women masculine and the men effeminate.”

In 1992, Texas fined textbook publishers about $1 million for hundreds of errors the Gablers found in 10 U.S. history books that publishers and the state already had approved.

Melvin Nolan Freeman Gabler was born in Katy, Texas, and served in the Army Air Forces in the Azores during World War II. He worked for 39 years with the company now known as Exxon Mobil Corp., retiring in 1974.

Educational Research Analysts became a nonprofit corporation in 1973.

Neal Frey, the group’s director, said the staff in recent years has been made up of the Gablers and Frey, his wife and daughter. The annual budget is about $100,000.

Gabler is survived by his wife of 62 years; two sons, James of Phoenix and Paul of Houston; and six grandchildren.