The Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans announced on December 5, 2017, that Gregory E. Abel would receive its 2018 award. That release is an organizational primary. It states he was born in 1962 in Edmonton, Alberta, and earned a commerce degree from the University of Alberta in 1984 with distinction.
The Association’s member biography fills in family context the 2017 notice only sketches. Before his birth, it says, his mother worked as a legal assistant and then became a stay-at-home parent; his father was in sales; they lived in a working-class neighborhood that was family-oriented. The page quotes Abel: “We played hockey nearly every day in summer and winter and stayed out until we were called in for dinner.” It quotes him on extended family and on a parental rule: if he was going to do something, he needed to give it his best effort. Those are his words as the Association published them.
Work started early, in the Association’s telling: advertising flyers, discarded bottles redeemed for cash, labor for a forest-products company, filling fire extinguishers for Levitt Safety in high school and college, and a small scholarship from that firm. Summers in college he worked for the City of Edmonton’s Parks and Recreation Department as a program planner and sports-camp counselor, living at home. He aimed at a competitive business program at the University of Alberta, took extra-credit exams to raise his chances, and later chased the Dean’s List. He writes, on the member page, that the quest for learning was “a good investment in myself.”
Exact month of the 1984 degree is not stated in the located Association text. A June 1, 1962, birth date appears on secondary encyclopedias; this journal uses 1962 as the Association wrote it. Spouse and children’s names are not in those Association pages and are not added here.