Handsome and truthful, Roy Gilbert will be missed
Every Monday night, for nearly 10 years, Roy Gilbert and his buddies would gather at the local Pizza Hut to play a few rounds of Liar’s Poker, a simple game that yielded a lot of cash to the man who best pulled the wool over his friends’ eyes.
And in the last several months of his life, when complications from Parkinson’s disease made it most difficult to move, Gilbert’s buddies would come to his home every Monday night, pick him up in his chair, drag him to the table, and watch their buddy come alive over 90 minutes’ worth of good-natured deception.
His friends quickly learned that illness was no handicap for this old fighter.
“Two weeks before he passed away, he broke the record,” said Jack Pring, one of Gilbert’s best friends. “He was quite a competitive warrior.”
Even when his muscles would give out and his body collapsed on the floor, Gilbert retained that indefatigable spirit.
“He’d put up his fists and say, ‘Come on, hit me while I’m down,’ ” said daughter Debra Wilde. “His sense of humor never went away.”
Gilbert peacefully died Dec. 30 in his living room surrounded by family. He was 86.
Born in Missouri, before his family relocated to Metaline Falls, Wash., when he was 17, Gilbert had established a fierce work ethic early toiling in the mines with his father, Roy Gilbert Sr.
The younger Gilbert was offered a basketball scholarship to Washington State University, but declined to join the Navy.
“His dad told him, ‘If you take the scholarship, all you’ll do is play with the girls – not basketball,’ ” recalls Wilde.
Gilbert served as chief petty officer on the USS Pensacola – a battleship stationed in Pearl Harbor during the famous surprise attack – and survived 13 major campaigns at Midway, Okinawa and the Philippines, among others, that resulted in more than a 57 percent casualty rate. “He never really talked much (about his service) until last year,” said Pring. “He was one of those quiet heroes.”
Those untold war stories seemed only the beginning of Gilbert’s knack for overcoming potentially debilitating circumstances.
After leaving the Navy in 1945, Gilbert joined the Washington State Patrol. On the way to an automobile accident, Gilbert was involved in a near-fatal car wreck that totaled his car and left him with a broken neck.
“He still directed traffic until the ambulance came,” said Pring, who hired Gilbert in the mid 1950s shortly after he left the WSP as a salesman at Pring’s Appleway Chevrolet dealership.
Gilbert and Pring hit it off immediately. “It was a beautiful relationship,” said Pring. “Never a word between us. At all times he was a dear friend.”
Gilbert’s handsome smile and generous personality made him a natural salesman – attributes that did not go unnoticed by his wife Anne, who met Gilbert in 1970 while he was serving at Playfair Race Course as a security inspector for the Washington State Horseracing Commission.
“We didn’t like each other at first.” said Anne, who was a hostess there at the time. “Well, I think we both did, but neither of us were going to admit it.”
The couple married in 1972. Both brought children into the marriage, and for Anne Gilbert’s son, Jim Lewis, who was 21 at the time, Gilbert was an admirable role model.
“The thing he gave me was his honesty,” said Lewis. “I grew from that. There was no sugar-coating. He was very black and white, right and wrong. From that I tried to be as honest as I could.”
Indeed, Gilbert was often known for his brutal honesty. On one occasion, remembers Wilde, a golfing partner asked Gilbert why he wasn’t nice to him. “Roy said, ‘Because I don’t like you,’ ” she said. That straight-forward truth was often times painful to hear, but certainly refreshing, his friends and family agree.
“He really did it his way,” said Pring. “He was his own man all the way.”
Of his four biological children, Wilde was fortunate to spend a majority of weekends riding horses with her dad, who was an avid horse lover. As “Little D,” she learned a great deal about character from the man most family members called “Big D.”
Before one competition Wilde, who often finished first, felt sorry for a girl who never won a ribbon. She told her father she planned to lose so the other girl had a chance to win. Gilbert told her to get off her horse. True to Gilbert’s warrior spirit, he told his daughter exactly how he saw things: “He put his hands on my shoulders and said, ‘If you don’t want to ride, don’t ride. But if you ride, you ride to win,’ ” says Wilde. (Wilde did go on to win, but she gave her ribbon to the girl when her father wasn’t looking.)
As if good looks, a sense of humor, strong work ethic and loyal friends weren’t enough admirable qualities, Gilbert was also a great singer. In a home video played at his memorial service, Gilbert downplays his talent before crooning “I Love You for Sentimental Reasons” to his wife.
“I know it won’t be very good,” he said, before launching into an incredibly touching rendition of the old classic to his beloved Anne.
The truth, if you ask another one of Gilbert’s longtime friends, is Gilbert was often the last guy to leave the piano during the sing-along sessions at any bar or music hall.
On a road trip to California with his friend John Peterson, Gilbert asked a bar’s pianist if he knew “Old Folks,” a song he had memorized ever since his dad got him hooked on it as a kid.
“Know it?” the man replied. “Hell, I wrote it.”
“Then Roy sang it while the man played and he got the whole place going!” Peterson remembers.
In fact, Gilbert’s charisma could have taken his life in a different direction when a good friend of his, who was the nephew of a well-known actor, tried to persuade him to come to Hollywood.
But a man of Gilbert’s character certainly fared much better with the path he chose, if the heartfelt testimonials of multiple friends and family members are any indication. In every photo featured at his memorial service, most especially with grandchildren and great-grandchildren, an enormous smile is plastered on his face.
“I sure as heck will miss him, I’ll tell you that,” says Pring.