Columbus lawyer who won millions for clients, served in Cuban Missile Crisis, dies
Columbus lawyer Neal Pope, who served his clients by winning multimillion-dollar verdicts and who served his country by leading a platoon of Marines during the Cuban Missile Crisis, has died.
Pope died Thursday due to complications from blood clots at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, where he had a heart transplant in 1993 and quadruple bypass surgery in 2004, niece Jill Tigner told the Ledger-Enquirer. He was 83.
His funeral is scheduled for 11 a.m. Wednesday at St. Luke United Methodist Church, 1104 Second Ave., in Columbus. His burial before the memorial service will be a private ceremony in Fort Mitchell National Cemetery.
According to this biography on the website of his law firm, Pope McGlamry, he was a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps when he participated in the October 1962 blockade of Cuba. He commanded a platoon on the USS Thuben, which was part of the landing force.
Pope recalled that experience in a 2016 interview with the L-E:
“As I stood on the deck of the ship in 1962, with Cuba on the horizon, as far as I could see in all directions were amphibs, that is troop ships — not the carriers and the cruisers and destroyers but troop ships,” he said. “I mean, it was horizon to horizon. That’s 25 miles. That entire flotilla could have been wiped out but for one thing. The documentation out of the Soviet Union confirmed that Castro wanted to use those tactical nukes but Russia had insisted that they remain under their tactical control and they would not agree to release them.”
Highlights of his 56-year law career include a $50 million verdict in a 1982 wrongful death case and a $31 million verdict in a 2018 case about a botched circumcision.
In 1991, Pope won for his client a settlement of a $21 million lawsuit against Upjohn, maker of the sleeping pill Halcion. Pope’s client claimed the drug’s intoxicating influence contributed to her shooting her mother to death.
Newsweek magazine featured Pope in its cover story about the controversy. Two days later, Pope was in St. Francis Hospital “fighting for my life” because of his ailing heart, he said in that 2016 interview.
The juxtaposition of that high and that low provided two valuable lessons:
“You’re just a piece of clay,” he said. “There’s nothing special about you. You’re just one heartbeat away from being nothing. It puts in perspective what we all are, and I tell my people all the time, ‘The worst enemy of a trial lawyer is a thing called ego.’ I despise it. I do my best to stomp it out in my lawyers.
“The second thing is that none of us are as great as we think we are. We’re sure as hell not as great as others think we are. We are what we are for the moment, and so as I said in my letter to my son, we view life in terms of memories of the past, hopes for the future and the realities of the present. The reality is you better do what you’re going to do that you can be proud of today because tomorrow you may be in that St. Francis with all those tubes in you and not be able to do anything.”
Pope helped Teresa Tomlinson become elected as the first female mayor of Columbus in 2010 by giving her the career opportunity that brought her to the city, first as a clerk in 1990, then hiring her as an attorney in 1991. She worked with Pope for 16 years.
“Neal was bigger than life,” Tomlinson, now with Hall Booth Smith, told the L-E in an email. “He had this tremendous courage and boldness, which made him an innovator in the legal profession, and a person who could deliver on that innovation. He delivered for more clients than you can imagine — setting record verdicts, slaying dragons and being a warrior for justice. He practiced literally up to the moment he died.”
Pope taught Tomlinson “to be brave in the face of overwhelming odds,” she said.
“You would accompany him into any battle because he had a cause and an end game,” she said. “I almost died twice with Neal. Once on a plane, once in a cab — he didn’t flinch either time. I remember him saying, ‘Teresa, I am not dying in the back of a cab.’ As a former Marine who had been deployed to the Bay of Pigs, who had a heart transplant in the 90s and a (quadruple) bypass years after that, I knew he was right.”
Pope’s wife of 46 years, Virginia, noted his soaring spirit rose above his health problems, and she thanked Emory for giving him nearly three decades of life with a transplanted heart.
“He was the most determined person I think I ever met,” she told the L-E. “He never gave up. He had a positive outlook on things. People liked him. … He loved people, and he treated everybody the same.”
Pope also was known for his organic farm, Neal Pope’s Farm, in Salem, Alabama, which grows tomatoes and hemp. The self-sustaining farm is powered by geothermal and solar energy and uses its own water from a reservoir. Auburn University and Alabama State University have conducted research on the farm.
This story was originally published August 15, 2022 at 11:19 AM.
