EMMA GILBERT, 82; DEVOTED HERSELF
TO ASSISTING HER ECONOMIST SPOUSE

Author: By William P. Coughlin, Globe Staff

Date: Tuesday, December 30, 1986
Page: 55
Section: OBITUARY

The widow of the noted economist, Richard V. Gilbert, whose theories captured attention during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Mrs. Gilbert died in her Cambridge home Monday, Dec. 29, after a long struggle with cancer.

A former child psychologist and for many years an outspoken voice for children's rights, Mrs. Gilbert chose to devote herself to her husband and his career, friends say, working with and following him far and wide.

Dr. Joseph Stern, executive director of the Harvard Institute of International Development in Cambridge, yesterday in a telephone interview recalled her as an "intelligent, warm, inquisitive person, inquisitive in the best sense of the word.

"She essentially she became Richard's alter ego, and helped him write and think through problems. . . basically she became a screen for him. He would bounce his ideas off her."

Stern cited the Gilberts' experience in Pakistan, where Mr. Gilbert worked with the national Planning Commission and she learned to read Urdu, so she could scan local newspapers and inform her husband of local events. ''Richard wanted to know not only what the papers were saying, but he wanted someone he could trust telling him. . . so he did not have to work through everything," Stern said. "She knew exactly the kind of things he wanted to hear; she was an extension of him. . . they were a couple that were like one."

In Pakistan as everywhere she helped her husband, Mrs. Gilbert also was active, involved with women's groups and welfare activities there, Stern said.

Stern said that after their marriage of nearly 60 years, when her spouse died in 1985, "she felt her life, too, basically had ended."

Mrs. Gilbert also joined her husband in Indonesia, Afghanistan and in other nations where he traveled as an economic adviser during the 1960s and '70s.

Retired Harvard professor John Eddison, formerly of Harvard's Development Advisory Service, observed at a Nov. 21 service in Harvard's Memorial Church that "without her, her late husband Richard Gilbert would not have been the person that he was."

After her graduation cum laude from Radcliffe in 1926, where she was the first married undergraduate student, Mrs. Gilbert earned her master's degree, also at Radcliffe, in 1928. Briefly in the 1930s she was a codirector of Camp Sharon, a camp for adolescents in Peekskill, N.Y.

During World War II, while her husband was busy estimating the potential of American wartime output for FDR, she was lecturing on child care in Washington and was cochairwoman of a federal project on the protection of infants and children during wartime.

After the war, she became a staff psychologist for children at Children's Hospital in Washington.

In Westport, Conn., in the 1950s, she lost an election bid to the school board, but the experience brought her a chance to write a newspaper column on educational issues in Fairfield County.

She leaves two sons, Walter Gilbert of Cambridge, a Harvard professor and Nobel Prize winner for chemistry in 1980, and Alan Gilbert, a professor at the University of Denver; a daughter, Dr. Joanne G. Schwartzberg of Chicago, a brother, E.V. Conason of White Plains, N.Y.; and six grandchildren.

COUGHL;12/29 NIGRO ;12/30,22:40 GILBER30