Episode 576: Honoring Homeschool Pioneer Sam Blumenfeld Who Would Have Turned 100.

May 31, 2026 would have been my friend and mentor’s 100 birthday.  Sam went to be with the Lord on June 1, 2015-a day after his 89th birthday.    Sam’s last book which he co-authored with Alex Newman was Crimes of the Educators.  A week prior to Sam’s passing, I called Alex and asked when he was planning on visiting Sam.  They had not yet met in person but frequently met on conference calls.  Alex said that he planned a summer visit.  I told him that he most likely won’t be alive by then.  We provided an airline ticket for him, and he flew to Boston on the following day, Thursday.  I had hoped to videotape an interview of the two of them, but Sam’s condition had deteriorated, and it would have been an injustice to him.  They interacted as if they were lifelong friends.   Alex, like numerous others, is carrying on the work of Sam.Sam Blumenfeld was born on May 31, 1926, in New York City.  His parents were Polish immigrants.  His mother, who Sam adored, was illiterate.  Sam attended a public school in the Bronx where he received an excellent education.  Sam was a World War II veteran serving in an artillery unit in Italy.    He participated in a prisoner escort where he took pity on a starving German soldier and shared his food with him.  After the war, Sam graduated from City College of New York.  He returned to postwar Europe visiting some friends he made during the war and returned to the U.S. to start a career in the publishing business.  Sam was fluent in several languages.  In 1963, he traveled to Madrid, Spain to interview Dr. Moise Tshombe, the pro-Western leader of Katanga who was ousted by the United Nations  peacekeepers who committed atrocities against the civilian population and replaced by the Moscow trained Patrice Lamumba.It was while he was an editor for Grosset and Dunlop when he got a request from a friend Attorney and Hall of Fame tennis player Watson Washburn to join his reading reform organization which he recently started.  Sam was surprised by the request telling Mr. Washburn that reading was a basic thing you learned in elementary school.  Mr. Washburn suggested that Sam read the book Why Johnny Can’t Read by Rudolf Flesch.  The book changed Sam’s life.  Flesch pointed out that the look-say or whole word method was introduced to  the nation’s schools in the mid to late 1930s.  The Depression made it difficult for most schools to buy the new look-say books but by the mid-1940s most schools around the nation adopted this method of reading.  It  The archive contains an on-line version of Sam’s Alpha-Phonics with all 128 lessons in either audio or video,  courses on cursive, and basic arithmetic.  It also contains PDF versions of most of Sam’s books, newsletters, hundreds of hours of Sam’s lectures in audio and video, manuscripts, and his correspondence.  For unlimited free access to the archive, all we need is an E-mail address and a username.  (Donations are, of course, greatly appreciated.)  Here is the link to the archive:  http://blumenfeld.campconstitution.net/main.htmCamp Constitution is a New Hampshire based charitable trust.  We run a week-long family camp, man information tables at various venues, have a book publishing arm, and post videos from our camp and others that we think are of importance. Please visit our website www.campconstitution.net