William A. Gebhart – An Appreciation

The Armed Forces Pest Management Board mourns the loss of one of its foremost friends.  On 26 June of this year, Mr. William A. Gebhart, a former entomologist at the Naval Facilities Engineering Command and a long-time contributor to AFPMB products and programs, passed away at his home in Springfield, Virginia, after a protracted and heroic struggle with Parkinson’s disease.  He was 77.  Even in retirement Bill remained a regular Board visitor, regaling the staff with a boundless supply of jokes and humorous observations that earned him the alias “Clyde W. Suckfinger” and the business card title “Executive Director for the Department of Fairly Useless Information.”

 

But Bill’s knowledge of applied entomology was far from useless – and he knew it.  He had the gift of being able to render complex, multidisciplinary subjects intelligible to ordinary mortals, as in his orchestration of the original (early 1990s) version of AFPMB Technical Guide No. 39, “Guidelines for Preparing DoD Pest Control Contracts using Integrated Pest Management,” which included a prescient nod to computer technology: a floppy disk.  And it was Bill who somehow collated all the entomological, regulatory and chemical information needed to generate the wall chart “DoD Integrated Pest Management Methods,” which is still regularly requested by AFPMB customers, despite the passage of nearly 20 years.  Additionally, Bill was a formidable presence at Board meetings, chairing the Real Property Protection Committee and serving as a singularly active member of the Equipment, Quarantine, and Research Committees.  The official minutes of the AFPMB brim with his arguments, insights, and leadership.

 

Still, if you asked him, Bill would rather have been known by his own descriptor: Gentlemen’s Gentleman.  Husband of the late Nancy R. Gebhart, he is survived by his five children (Laura, Brian, Kimberly, Wendy, and Christopher) and four grandchildren.  These were first in Bill’s life, of course, but those of us who had the good fortune of being his contemporaries would like to think that the AFPMB “family” was a close second.

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Bill Gebhart during one of his many post-retirement visits to the AFPMB.  Left to right: Wayne Fordham, Sandy Evans, Herb Bolton, Bill, Harvey Shultz.