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Robert Lee Gilbertson (January 15, 1925 – October 26, 2011) was a distinguished American mycologist and educator. He spent the next 26 years on the faculty at University of Arizona until his retirement from teaching in 1995 and then as Professor Emeritus until his death. He concurrently held positions as Plant Pathologist, Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Arizona (1967-95) for a project “Research on wood-rotting fungi and other fungi associated with southwestern plants” and was collaborator and consultant with Center for Forest Mycology Research, US Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory, Madison, Wisconsin (1957-1981).

Early life
Gil was born on January 15, 1925, in Hamilton, Montana to George and Eula Norris Gilbertson. He had one sibling George N. Gilbertson. They grew up in Missoula. Gil shared his youthful adventures with a best friend whose aunt ran a bordello. He also had fond memories of his Uncle Nick, a railroad man for whom one of his grandsons was named. Gil, always a reader, enjoyed the memoir A River Runs Through It and Other Stories not only for its literary merits, but also because it was set in the Missoula of his youth. Norman Maclean mentioned many people and places Gil had known. Also, the narrator had a younger brother who died young, and this reminded Gil of his younger brother, George, who died as a young man of a brain tumor. Gil hated that surgery had changed his brother completely but did not cure him. Growing up in Missoula, Gil also had known several men, one the father of a friend, who died in the 1949 Mann Gulch fire described in another Maclean book, Young Men and Fire.

Gil graduated from Missoula Central High School in 1942 soon after the US entered WWII. He had to wait until his January birthday when he became 18 and could enlist in the Army. He was was sent to Europe, where he served as a combat infantryman in the U. S. Army from 1943-1946. Gil received the European Theater Campaign Medal with two battle stars, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart. On December 13, 1984 Gil wrote about how he earned the Purple Heart.

… 40 years ago today I was a 19 year old combat infantryman in C. F, 309th Inf. Regt., 78th Inf. Division, participating in an attack on the German Wehrmacht in the Hürtgen Forest in the Ardennes. Freezing cold -- snow covering everything -- in the pre-dawn darkness a flare fired from the German lines suddenly lit up the area and revealed my company moving down a road – mortar shells and 88 shells began to fall in our midst almost immediately. My friends started dropping all around me – several killed instantly, others fatally wounded. I felt a blow on my left leg like someone had hit me with a baseball bat. I hit the ground and crawled off the road into a low spot. I realized I had dropped the spare barrel for my machine gun and crawled back out on the road and retrieved it. The company commander (Captain Brey – later killed instantly) came up and told us to go with him and he would deploy us in the woods. We went in and established our line and came under machine gun fire and mortar fire and more of our company were killed. The captain told us to dig in and I started to dig a foxhole in the frozen ground but by this time my leg really hurt and I couldn’t stand on it and my boot was full of blood. I crawled over to Captain Brey and told him I had been hit in the leg and he told me to go back to the battalion aid station, which was several hundred yards back near the area where I was wounded in the first place. I had to crawl on my stomach the whole way as the area was under heavy fire but I made it. The medic at the battalion cut off my boot and bandaged my leg and gave me some sulfa pills. Then they put me in a jeep with some other wounded guys – a couple of stretchers and the jeep tore off at high speed for the regimental aid station under artillery fire most of the way. We finally made it to the aid station set up in a house and there were a couple of surgeons there working on the most severely wounded. There were quite a few bodies there and numerous guys with severe head or chest wounds and obviously dying. I was put in an ambulance with several others and taken to a railhead where hospital trains were taking the wounded back into France. I don’t remember too much about that except a nurse came around every few hours and gave me a shot of penicillin (pretty new stuff then) and we finally arrived at Paris where we were taken to a large hospital. A chaplain came around one day with a copy of general orders awarding a bunch of us the Purple Heart. I still have my copy. After a week some of us were flown over to England in DC-3’s. I remember all the air force crew had parachutes but none of us wounded had one. I asked one of the crew what we did if the Luftwaffe shot us down. He said “tough shit buddy.” Fortunately, we made it and when I arrived at the hospital in England I was pretty sure that I had probably survived the war. When I look back and realize how close I came to death at the age of 19 it doesn’t seem possible that I actually went through that experience and am alive and well today.

On Friday October 25, 1985, he again remembered the war when he wrote about a trip to Europe when he worked at Kew and went sightseeing in London. “On the way to Trafalgar Square we [Gil and Pat] stopped at the site of the War Room in the Cabinet Building along St. James Park and toured the restored War Museum –very fascinating to me since I was there at that time and lived through a lot of the history myself.” He remarked that his bad feet, perhaps never recovered from the war, suffered from the long walks of sightseeing. On his 72nd birthday (15 January 1997), Gil reflected, “I’m glad to be here when I look back to when I was 19 in the Hürtgen Forest in December 1944 and didn’t know if I would even get to be 20.”

Gil returned from World War II with shrapnel scars and begin his studies under the G.I. Bill of Rights. In 1946 he enrolled at the University of Montana. He majored in Botany rather than Forestry as he had intended, because he wanted to study a foreign language (German), and the strict forestry curriculum did not allow that option. During his undergraduate work Gil married Patricia Park in 1948, and upon their graduations in 1949 (Gil’s graduation with honors), they went to the University of Washington for the next two years (1950-1951). As an undergraduate Gil had helped Reubin Diettert with his research, so he had had exposure to fungi when he arrived at Washington. There he began a master’s degree program with Daniel Stuntz. Gil held Stuntz in especially high regard and was particularly grateful because Stuntz had saved him from a herbarium assistantship assigned by the department chair, one that would have required him to disinfect herbarium specimens with mercuric chloride as was the practice at the time. In 1951 Gil received his master's degree in mycology with Stuntz, and Pat became a certified dietician.

Fresh from Seattle, Gil went east to begin work on a PhD with Josiah Lowe at State University of New York, College of Forestry at Syracuse University in 1951. Thus began Gil's 60-year affair with wood-decaying fungi. His PhD degree was completed in 1954 in mycology and forest pathology with a thesis on Polyporus montagnei and Cyclomyces greenii. After receiving his PhD Gil remained at Syracuse for six months as a research assistant until he was hired as an assistant professor of forestry at the University of Idaho. He and Pat spent the next five years (1954-59) in Moscow, and their son and daughter, Park and Joan, were born in Moscow, Idaho, 27 August 1956 and 23 July 1959, respectively. From Idaho Gil returned to Syracuse as Associate Professor of Botany in the College of Forestry. He and Pat moved six weeks after Joan was born. They rented an older home from a professor on sabbatical while their new home in Camillus, a suburb of Syracuse, was being built. Although he spent eight years (1959-1967) as a faculty member at Syracuse, Gil felt that the faculty still looked upon him as graduate student. At a time when jobs were not well advertised and a contact was needed to get an academic job, he felt fortunate to be appointed as Professor at the University of Arizona in 1967. He spent the next 26 years on the faculty in Tucson until his retirement from teaching in 1995 and then as Professor Emeritus until his death. He concurrently held positions as Plant Pathologist, Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Arizona (1967-95) for a project “Research on wood-rotting fungi and other fungi associated with southwestern plants” and was collaborator and consultant with Center for Forest Mycology Research, US Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory, Madison, Wisconsin (1957-1981).