Gil returned from World War II with shrapnel wounds and broken feet to began his studies under the G.I. Bill of Rights.  In 1946 he enrolled at the University of Montana.  He majored in botany rather than forestry as he had intended, because he wanted to study a foreign language and a forestry major did not give him that option.  Upon graduation from Montana Gil went to the University of Washington for two years and received a master's degree in mycology with Daniel Stuntz as an advisor.  Gil holds Dr. Stuntz in especially high regard because he saved Gil from a deadly herbarium assistantship to which the department chair had assigned him, one that required that Gil disenfect herbarium specimens (as was the practice) with mercuric chloride. Fresh from Seattle in 1951, Gil began to work on a PhD with Joe Lowe at Syracuse, and thus began Gil's 49-year affair with wood-decaying fungi .  The PhD degree was completed in 1954, and after five years at the University of Idaho, Gil returned to Syracuse as Associate Professor of Botany in the College of Forestry.  From Syracue he went to the University of Arizona as Professor in 1967 to spend the next 26 years in that position, until his retirement from teaching in 1995.

The work goes on in Hawaii, in Mexico, and in other regions of the world from which the wood-decaying fungi reach out. Gil has been a valued teacher for all of us, mostly because he never stops learning himself; Gil also is our friend and confidant.