James E. Gilbert, 1920-2012: WWII vet led Gilbert Mail Service

James E. Gilbert, a Navy veteran and Pearl Harbor survivor who took over his father’s downtown Toledo mailing and duplicating business, died Friday in Swan Creek Retirement Village. He was 91.

The cause of death was not known, his daughter Pamela said. Mr. Gilbert, formerly of Ottawa Hills, had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, but his health was in decline only recently.

He retired as chairman of Gilbert Mail Service Inc., which his father, Hal, founded in 1924 primarily as a duplicating service. To start, the business had a typewriter, Multigraph, mimeograph, and Addressograph to offer advertising by mail to Toledo businesses.

Mr. Gilbert sold the business after he retired. It closed in 2010.

His father coined the acronym that became part of the company name — Mail Advertising Illustrated Letters.

“The concept was originated in an era when we offered the only inexpensive way available to transmit an advertising communications message on paper” — using then-current technology such as mimeographing, Mr. Gilbert said for an oral history published in conjunction with the firm’s 65th anniversary.

Gilbert Mail Service stayed current with technology and trends in the mass mailing industry and, at its 65th anniversary, was thriving. Still, Mr. Gilbert said then, “The real history of our business is written in people.”

He noted that several early employees were still alive more than 60 years later.

“We have had three generations of not only my family, but several other families working here,” he said. His son, Tim, was a member of the third generation.

In 1974, Mr. Gilbert was elected president of the Toledo Small Business Association. His business received national awards and, in 1981, he received the Silver Medal Award from the Advertising Club of Toledo, a distinction that made him Toledo “advertising person of the year.”

“He had good ethics and was a hard worker,” said Alonzo “Lon” Poll, who was president of the former H. Poll Electric Co. “Jim was a fine gentleman. He never rattled anybody up. As a person, he was first-class all the way.”

Mr. Gilbert was committed to downtown Toledo, where the firm got its start. In the early 1980s, he renovated a historic building at Monroe and Huron Streets as the Gilbert Mail Service headquarters.

The company was recognized in 1985 by the Junior League of Toledo for its contribution to the revitalization of the downtown area.

He was born April 29, 1920, in Fort Wayne, Ind., to Marie and Hal Gilbert. He was a 1938 graduate of DeVilbiss High School. He attended the University of Michigan for two years and the University of Toledo for more than a year. He entered the Navy in 1940 in an officer training program.

He was sent to the destroyer USS Macdonough at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The ship was being overhauled and he was at the executive officer’s house on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese planes attacked the harbor. His first warning of trouble, he told The Blade late last year, was when he heard gunfire. He dressed as quickly as he could and caught a ride back.

Once on base, he ran toward his ship as a Japanese plane strafed a cargo vessel and he seemed to be in the line of fire.

“Someone asked me once why I was running back to my ship if it was under attack. I said, ‘That’s where my job was,’?” he told The Blade last year.

He only began to speak about his experiences as his grandchildren grew up.

And though he later gave public talks, he preferred to do his thinking of what occurred in private, during silent times at church, he told The Blade in 1998.

His wartime service was in the Pacific Theater. He was a 1948 graduate of the University of California-Berkeley, from which he received a bachelor’s of business administration degree.

He was a captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve and remained active through 1969, when he turned over command of the reserve group in Toledo.

Last fall, he traveled to the World War II Memorial with Honor Flight of Northwest Ohio.

He was a member of and long active in the Toledo post of the American Legion. His father started publishing the Toledo Post Bulletin in 1928.

Mr. Gilbert was a Mason and was a member of Sanford Collins Lodge, F&AM. He was a former member of the Inverness Club.

Surviving are his wife, Jane, whom he married May 26, 1942, daughters, Pamela Shangler and Dena Early, son, Timothy S. Gilbert, sister, Mary Flanigan, four grandchildren, and a great-granddaughter.

Memorial services are to be at 2 p.m. Friday in the chapel of Swan Creek Retirement Village. Arrangements are by the Foth-Dormeyer Mortuary.

The family suggests tributes to Senior Independence Hospice or St. Michael’s in the Hills Episcopal Church, of which he was a longtime member.

Contact Mark Zaborney at: mzaborney@theblade.com or 419-724-6182.