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
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