DAVE MUNDY:

Sadly, I am writing this tribute for my friend, Dave Mundy, former editor of the Katy Times.  Dave passed away on January 15, 2015 at his home.

His death was discovered when he didn't report for work yesterday morning, and fellow workers went to see why.

Dave in the 1990's had been the editor of the Katy Times, and he served in that capacity very well. His writings were the best, and I'm certain that he increased the readership of that newspaper greatly. He began his post there just before I resigned my position on the Katy school board.  I would have stayed if I had known what an asset Mr. Mundy would be to the field of education.

He was smart, witty, perceptive, and quickly got the deal about the underhanded agenda of "education reform."  When fellow former board member, Ken Burton, and I began to try to educate the public about the skulduggery that was going on with the State Board of Education and the Texas State Legislature, Dave would write tons of articles pointing out the fallacies of their arguments and plans. He would print my very verbose "letters to the editor" as fast as I could write them. He got it, and it didn't take him two minutes when he started reading what we asked him to read, to figure it all out.

For a while, the Hartman family, owners of the Katy Times, gave Mr. Mundy free reign to write what he felt was necessary.  Dave was so effective, that after a year or two, it appeared that the superpowers (i.e., at that time Governor Bush and friends) started pressuring the owners to reign in Mr. Mundy. Governor Bush was getting ready to run for President and wanted to be an "education President," and all of this stuff didn't bode well for him.

I recall one SBOE meeting when many of us signed up to speak about Texas Education Commissioner Mike Moses' really dumb plan to implement "Real World Forums" and run a scam on the public.  Dave had written a scathing article on the front page of the Times about Moses and his plan the day before the meeting, and we took fifty copies of the paper to that meeting.  I looked up at one point during the hearing and practically every one in the room had the Katy Times open to the Op-Ed page and were reading it.  It was a beautiful sight!

Being true to himself, Dave chose not to stay at the Katy Times under such conditions as were forced upon him and gave up a job that he cherished and did very well.  The lily-livered owners, in my opinion, should be ashamed of themselves for caving in to such pressure. So much for a "free press."

Dave knocked around doing one job or another after that, but his outspoken ways on the issues always got him under the gun of the people for whom he was working.

One time, while working as an assistant manager at a Wal Mart, he apprehended a shoplifter.  Unbelievably, he was fired for his act!  I suppose they didn't want the bad publicity of a crime at their store.

As one of his friends said on hearing of his passing, "Dave did what was right and paid the price."

Dave, during that time of first acknowledgement of the underhanded efforts by the power elite to liberalize public education, wrote a book called  Duh!  It embodied his humor, but the serious theme, "the takeover of public education in Texas" was very well described.  He wrote the book in a hurry, and he self-published it.  It probably sold a hundred copies, but I still look at it from time to time and marvel at his acumen.

Underlying all of his career was the fact that Dave was a Marine.  He upheld the honor of that organization in his personal life. 

Recently he had been the editor of the newspaper in Gonzales, Texas and had also run against the incumbent, unsuccessfully, for the Texas State Board of Education in his mostly Hispanic district. I hope he had a good time doing that.

He deserved better than he got, and I will miss him.

Semper Fi!

[All forty-one of his best articles from the Katy Times can be found on this website under "Education/Mundy, Dave"]