Education and Military
"Sonny" Gilbert graduated from Wisner High School in 1940 and thereafter attended the University of Louisiana at Monroe (then Northeast Junior College before it was expanded to four-year status) and Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He left LSU and enlisted in the United States Army during World War II and served with a B-24 bomber unit in England.
In 1946, after military service, Gilbert married the former Barbara Jane Peck (October 26, 1922 – May 1985) of the Ferry Place Plantation in Sicily Island, the daughter of William Smith Peck, Sr. (1873–1946), and the former Estelle Woodard (1893–1983). It was then that he moved nine miles south from Wisner to Sicily Island. Barbara Peck was the sister of Sicily Island civic figures William S. Peck, Jr. (April 12, 1916–February 1987), and Henry C. Peck, Sr. (June 21, 1919–January 24, 2004), a contractor, rancher, farmer, past president of the Sicily Island State Bank, and, from 1946 to 2000, a director of Concordia Bank and Trust Company.
Another future state representative and later state senator, Cecil R. Blair, also grew up in Sicily Island, as the son of a sharecropping family. He represented Rapides Parish in the legislature from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Read more about this topic: J. C. Gilbert
Famous quotes containing the words education and, education and/or military:
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
—H.G. (Herbert George)
“One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
“The military and the clergy cause us much annoyance; the clergy and the military, they empty our wallets and rob our intelligence.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)