Robert Lee Gilbertson (January 15, 1925 – October 26, 2011) was a distinguished American mycologist and educator. He was a faculty member at University of Arizona for 26 years until his retirement from teaching in 1995; he was a Professor Emeritus at U of A until his death on October 26, 2011, in Tucson, Arizona. 2011. He held concurrent 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 Early years 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 had not cured 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 when he could enlist in the Army. He 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.
Gil's stories of World War II
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-3s. 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.”
Life After WWII Education Gil returned from World War II and began his studies under the G.I. Bill of Rights. In 1946 he enrolled at the University of Montana where he majored in Botany and graduated with honors. Gil married Patricia Park in 1948, and they went to the University of Washington for the next two years (1950-1951). As an undergraduate Gil assisted Reuben Diettert with his mycological research, so he had some exposure to fungi before he arrived at Washington.Robert Lee Gilbertson 1926-2011 doi: 10.3852/12-118 Mycologia November/December 2012 vol. 104 no. 6 1521-1524 There he began a master's degree program with Daniel Stuntz. Gil received his master's degree in mycology with Stuntz in 1951.Bursdall, Nakasone & Blackwell. Robert Lee Gilbertson 1925-2011. Mycologia, 104(6), 2012, pp. 1521–1524. DOI: 10.3852/12-118 # 2012 by The Mycological Society of America, Lawrence, KS 66044-8897.
Gil pursued a PhD with Josiah Lowe at State University of New York, College of Forestry at Syracuse University in 1951, studying mycology and forest pathology. Gil would go on to study wood-decay fungi for 60 years. His PhD degree was completed in 1954 in mycology and forest pathology with a thesis on Polyporus montagnei and Cyclomyces greenii and published his first paper on these species in Mycologia in 1954.Gilbertson, R.L. 1954. Polyporus montagnei and Cyclomyces greenei. 46(2):229-233 His thesis on the genus Poria in the central Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest was published in 1954.1956. The genus Poria in the central Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest. Lloydia 19:65–85.
Post-doctoral studies and professorships 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 for eight years (1959-1967). He was appointed as professor at the University of Arizona in 1967. 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). He spent 26 years on the faculty in Tucson until his retirement from teaching in 1995 and then as Professor Emeritus until his death on October 26, 2011, from complications due to prostate cancer Gil's Obituary Arizona Daily Star
In 2001, he was honoured by botanist Erast Parmasto who named a fungal genus in the family Fomitopsidaceae as Gilbertsonia.
The Robert L. Gilbertson Mycological Herbarium Gil's mycological herbarium is an important legacy. It contains almost 40,000 wood-decaying and other fungal specimens, especially from Arizona and the western United States, Mexico, Hawaii, Alaska, and the Gulf Coast region. He built the collection from almost nothing and accessioned the specimens with minimal assistance. In 2005 the University completed the renovation of historic Herring Hall, and the University of Arizona Fungal Herbarium, renamed the Robert L. Gilbertson Mycological Herbarium was inaugurated on Friday, March 11, 2005. The names of the fungi were current ones, unusual for wood decay fungi, a group in which genus level reassignments remain common. The National Science Foundation recently supplied funding for digitization that currently is underway and should soon be available by searching the herbarium on the Internet. The value of Gil's collection has been increased by the precise substrate information and geographical coverage he included for his collections.
The Herbarium is unique because its specialized collections document the occurrence of a complex, speciose desert mycota in a region once said by proposal reviewers to have no fungi. Gil put great stock in the USDA Yearbook of Agriculture (1941) that contained state unit values for precipitation. When someone asked why he bothered to plan a foray for the August 1980 MSA meeting with AIBS in Tucson, he was quick to point out that August rainfall in Arizona was almost three times greater than that of Washington state (Gilbertson 1980). The collection also houses the vouchers of the many new and rare fungi, large numbers fully documented from Gil's large number of publications. The collection is a resource for economically, biographically, and taxonomically important groups of fungi.
Research areas of interest Mycological systematics and floristics; wood-rotting basidiomycetes; biological diversity in world ecosystems.
Gil's contributions to mycology extended to many fungal groups, most notably Sonoran Desert rusts, myxomycetes, downy mildews, and ascomycetes, and even the fungus-like plant pathogens, Pythium and Labyrinthula . His work included the use of cladistics, synoptic keys, and the study of wood decay, wood decay inhibitors, and detoxification processes. Gil described many new fungal species from under-studied substrates, including fungi that are associated with Sonoran Desert plants and cacti.