John Allen Gable

John Allen Gable (1943, Rockford - February 18, 2005, Glen Cove) Marcelle Fischer of the New York Times wrote in 2006 that Gable was "widely considered to be the country's, if not the world's, foremost expert on Roosevelt."

After graduating from the Lenox School for Boys, Gable attended Kenyon College, where he studied medieval and American history. He was part of Psi Upsilon and was a staff member of the college newspaper, the Kenyon Collegian. Gable's senior honors thesis in 1965 was titled A nineteenth century patrician becomes a twentieth century president: an interpretation of the career of Theodore Roosevelt, 1880-1909. The culmination of his history doctorate from Brown University was a dissertation on the Bull Moose Party in 1972. He later developed this into his 1978 book The Bull Moose Years: Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party.

Career After finishing graduate school, Gable was a history instructor at Brown (1972–1973), From 1989 until 2005, he was an adjunct history professor at Hofstra University. In 1974, he joined the US Department of the Interior's Historic American Engineering Record project, which "catalog[ed] the historic engineering and commercial ventures of Long Island, Brooklyn and Queens".

In 1974, when Gable moved into the role of executive director, the Theodore Roosevelt Association (TRA) was on its last leg, having lost many of its members after the organization achieved its goal of turning Sagamore Hill into a museum. Over the course of the next 31 years, he grew membership to more than 2,000. American Experience (1996), In 2001, Roosevelt was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for the Spanish-American War, the culmination of a campaign led by the TRA under Gable.

Gable was a member of the Organization of American Historians, Oyster Bay Historical Society, Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, and the Center for the Study of the Presidency. He was also part of his church's vestry and a past trustee of the Oyster Bay Historical Society.

Death and legacy Gable died from inoperable cancer on February 18, 2005, at what was then called North Shore University Hospital at Glen Cove. Shortly after, the Friends of Sagamore Hill, an organization Gable helped found, named its annual lecture series in his honor. Hofstra University awarded its first John Allen Gable Award in 2008.

Selected works Books (author)

With Natalie A. Naylor and Douglas Brinkley.