Robert Lee Gilbertson

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).

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.

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.