Free-Speech Champion Gordon Conable Dies
Gordon Conable, president of the American Library Association’s Freedom to Read Foundation since 1998, ALA Council member, and vice president of West Coast operations for Library Systems and Services (LSSI), died suddenly January 12 of a heart attack at his home in Riverside, California. He was 58.
“Gordon was an unsurpassed champion of intellectual freedom, a wise and generous mentor to many, and a consummate librarian who was a true leader of our profession,” said John W. Berry, who succeeded Conable as FTRF president at ALA’s 2005 Midwinter Meeting. Characterizing Conable as “a giant of this profession,” FTRF Executive Director Judith Krug told American Libraries that she viewed him as a “creative and brilliant librarian” whose ideas were “so important to where librarianship is going.”
Earning his MLS from the Columbia University library school in 1976, Conable began his library career that same year at the Fort Vancouver Regional Library and rose to become associate director of the library system in 1978. He served as director of the Monroe County (Michigan) Library System from 1988 to 1998; during his tenure there, he withstood controversy over the library’s adding Madonna’s Sex to the collection. “It got very ugly and hostile, and there were bomb threats phoned in,” Robert Lepsig, who was a board member at the time, said of the episode in the January 18 Toledo Blade. The episode earned Conable the 2000 John Phillip Immroth Award.
Conable’s wife, Irene Conable, who is a school library media specialist, told the Blade that he considered librarianship “a place in the world where he could have a professional life that supported his philosophical beliefs.” FTRF has established a fund in his honor.
Posted January 18, 2005; revised January 19, 2005.
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