Memories of My Father

My father, Kirkland R. Gable (born Ralph Schwitzgebel) died Sunday. Here are some things I want you to know about him.

Of teaching, he said that authentic education is less about textbooks, exams, and technical skills than about moving students "toward a bolder comprehension of what the world and themselves might become." He was a beloved psychology professor at California Lutheran University.

I have never known anyone, I think, who brought as much creative fun to teaching as he did. He gave out goofy prizes to students who scored well on his exams (e.g., a wind-up robot nun who breathed sparks of static electricity: "nunzilla"). Teaching about alcoholism, he would start by pouring himself a glass of wine (actually, water with food coloring), pouring more wine and acting drunker, arguing with himself, as the class proceeded. Teaching about child development, he would bring in my sister or me, and we would move our mouths like ventriloquist dummies as he stood behind us, talking about Piaget or parenting styles (and then he'd ask our opinion about parenting styles). Teaching about neuroanatomy, he brought in a brain jello mold, which he sliced up and passed around class for the students to eat ("yum! occipital cortex!"). Etc.

As a graduate student and then assistant professor at Harvard in the 1960s and 1970s, he shared the idealism of his mentors Timothy Leary and B.F. Skinner, who thought that through understanding the human mind we can transform and radically improve the human condition -- a vision he carried through his entire life.

His comments about education captured his ideal for thinking in general: that we should always aim toward a bolder comprehension of what the world and we ourselves, and the people around us, might become.

He was always imagining the potential of the young people he met, seeing things in them that they did not always see in themselves. He especially loved juvenile delinquents, whom he encouraged to think expansively and boldly. He recruited them from street corners, paying them to speak their hopes and stories into reel-to-reel tapes, and he recorded their declining rates of recidivism as they did this, week after week. His book about this work, Streetcorner Research (1964), was a classic in its day. As a prospective graduate student in the 1990s, I proudly searched the research libraries at the schools I was admitted to, always finding multiple copies with lots of date stamps in the 1960s and 1970s.

With his twin brother Robert, he invented the electronic monitoring ankle bracelet, now used as an alternative to prison for non-violent offenders.

He wanted to set teenage boys free from prison, rewarding them for going to churches and libraries instead of street corners and pool halls. He had a positive vision rather than a penal one, and he imagined everyone someday using location monitors to share rides and to meet nearby strangers with mutual interests -- ideas which, in 1960, seem to have been about fifty years before their time.

With degrees in both law and psychology, he helped to reform institutional practice in insane asylums -- which were often terrible places in the 1960s, whose inmates had no effective legal rights. He helped force these institutions to become more humane and to release harmless inmates held against their will. I recall his stories about inmates who were often, he said, "as sane as could be expected, given their current environment", and maybe saner than their jailors -- for example an old man who decades earlier had painted his neighbor's horse as an angry prank, and thought he'd "get off easy" if he convinced the court he was insane.

As a father, he modeled and rewarded unconventional thinking. We never had an ordinary Christmas tree that I recall -- always instead a cardboard Christmas Buddha (with blue lights poking through his eyes), or a stepladder painted green, or a wild-found tumbleweed carefully flocked and tinseled -- and why does it have to be on December 25th? I remember a few Saturdays when we got hamburgers from different restaurants and ate them in a neutral location -- I believe it was the parking lot of a Korean church -- to see which burger we really preferred. (As I recall, my sister and he settled on the Burger King Whopper, while I could never confidently reach a preference, because it seemed like we never got the methodology quite right.)

He loved to speak with strangers, spreading his warm silliness and unconventionality out into the world. If we ordered chicken at a restaurant, he might politely ask the server to "hold the feathers". Near the end of his life, if we went to a bank together he might gently make fun of himself, saying something like "I brought along my brain," here gesturing toward me with open hands, "since my other brain is sometimes forgetting things now". For years, though we lived nowhere near any farm, we had a sign from the Department of Agriculture on our refrigerator sternly warning us never to feed table scraps to hogs.

I miss him painfully, and I hope that I can live up to some of the potential he so generously saw in me, carrying forward some of his spirit.

-----------------------------------------------

I am eager to hear stories about his life from people he knew, so please, if you knew him, add one story (or more!) to the mirror post at The Splintered Mind. (Future visitors from 2018 or whenever, still post!) Memories are also being collected on his Facebook wall.

We are planning a memorial celebration for him in July to which anyone who knew him would be welcome to come. Please email me for details if you're interested.