Preston Gibson – Second Lieuetnant, United States Marine Corps

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PRESTON GIBSON, 57, YALE ATHLETE, DIES

Had Part in Famous Football Tie Game with Harvard
Also On Baseball Team
Cited For War Heroism
Won Croix de Guerre – Wrote Many Plays
Burial in Arlington This Afternoon
February 15, 1937

Preston Gibson, who played on the Yale varsity football and baseball teams and won the Croix de Guerre in the World War, died yesterday in the Veterans Hospital 81, at 130 Kingsbridge Road, Bronx, New York, after a month’s illness of heart disease complicated by uremia. He was 57 years old.

Recently Mr. Gibson had been living at164 East Thirty-eighth Street, New York City, and had been attached to the Federal Re-Employment Bureau at 342 Madison Avenue.

A military funeral service, to be followed by burial, will take place this afternoon in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington.

Mr. Gibson was born in Washington, a son of the late United States Senator Randall Lee Gibson of Louisiana and the former Mary Montgomery, whose sister married the late Chief Justice Edward D. White of the United States Supreme Court. He entered Yale in the Fall of 1897, and became prominent in athletics, taking part in the 0-to-0 football tie of 1899 with Harvard.

In his junior year he eloped with a pupil of the Masters School of Dobbs Ferry, New York, Miss Minna Field, niece of the late Marshall Field of Chicago and a stepdaughter of the late Thomas Nelson Page.  They were divorced in 1907.

The next year Mr. Gibson married Grace McMillan Jarvis, a granddaughter of the late United States Senator James McMillan of Michigan. The late Reginald Vanderbilt acted as best man. This union ended a few years lager, and in 1919 Mr. Gibson married Beatrice Benjamin Pratt of this city, former wife of Alexander Dallas Bache Pratt and granddaughter of the late Henry H. Rogers of the Standard Oil Company.

A Paris divorce was obtained 1922 and three years later Mr. Gibson married Miss Evelyn Harris Spaulding of Haverhill, Massachusetts.  A fourth divorce took place in 1927.

Three sons and a daughter survive. Henry Field Gibson, son of the former Minna Field, is connected with the Field Museum in Chicago.  James McMillan Gibson and Marie Preston Gibson are children of the second marriage, and there is a son by the fourth marriage, Henry Spaulding Gibson.

Soon after the Germans invaded Belgium, Mr. Gibson joined the French Ambulance Corps and for the next three years served continuously with that organization and the American Ambulance Corps. He received the Croix deGuerre for bravery at the Chemin des Dames, and was cited for heroism during the attack at St. Quentin in August 1917.

In 1918 he came home, enlisted in the Marine Corps and broke records as a recruiting sergeant, persuading 3,200 men to “sign up” in thirteen days. A Liberty Loan speech of his at the Hippodrome in October1918 brought in $163,000.

Mr. Gibson wrote a dozen or more plays, many of them produced, but none with great success.  “The Turning Point,” presented at the Hackett Theater, this city, in February 1910, had the strongest run.  He also wrote “Mrs. Erskine’s Devotion,” “Fate,” “Cupid’s Trick” “Success,” “The Vacuum,” a one-act thriller at the Belasco Theater, with Charlotte Walker; “Derelicts,” “Drifting,” “The Revelation,” “The Secret Way,” Lola Montez,” and several others.

Some years ago Mr. Gibson was prominent in the social life of New York, Washington and Newport.  His clubs then included the Metropolitan and Chevy Chase of Washington, Clambake and Reading Room of Newport, Yale, Lambs, Strollers and the Players of this city, Royal Automobile of London and the Travelers of Paris.

GIBSON, PRESTON
2ND LT USMC RES
DATE OF DEATH: 02/15/1937
BURIED AT: SECTION 6  SITE 9124 EH
ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

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