For a long time, though, hardly anyone noticed him at all. He was the school janitor.
Gabe had once started college at Southern University. But his mother worked as a housekeeper, and she was struggling to support his four brothers and sisters and pay for his education. So in 1979 he left school and went to work to help his family.
He found work at Port Barre Elementary in Port Barre, Louisiana, and spent his days there with a mop and a bucket. His “office” was a tiny cleaning closet down the hall.
Then, one day in 1985, the principal at the time, Westley Jones, pulled him aside.
“He said, ‘I’d rather see you grading papers than picking them up,’” Gabe remembered.
No one had ever believed in him like that.
“I took it to heart,” he said.
It took years before he could make it happen. But at the age of 39, while still working full time as the school’s janitor, Gabe went back to college.
His days were long. “I would come to work at like 5 in the morning and leave at 7, and go to school all day, and then come back and finish up my eight hours of work here, and then go home and do homework,” he said.
When the classrooms were empty, he was cleaning them. When he wasn’t cleaning them, he was studying.
He earned his degree. In 2008, after nearly three decades with a mop in his hands, he became a teacher at the very same school. Then he went on to earn a master’s degree in education.
And in late 2013, Port Barre Elementary got a new principal: Mr. Gabe Sonnier.
When a CBS News reporter came to visit, Gabe proudly opened the door of that little closet. “This was my office right here,” he said, smiling.
Even as principal, he still cleans his own office.
And the children at his school hear the same lesson from him again and again.
“Don’t let your situation that you’re in now define what you’re going to become later,” he said. “I always tell them it’s not where you start, it’s how you finish.”
Who believed in you when no one else did? Tell us in the comments.
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