Issue 42: Spring 2010 - Melbourne Cricket Club
Issue 42: Spring 2010 - Melbourne Cricket Club
Issue 42: Spring 2010 - Melbourne Cricket Club
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Ambassador Laurence E. Pope and Mr. Ralph H. Pope accept a folded flag from Inspector General of the Marine Corps<br />
Brig. Gen. Kenneth J. Lee during their father's burial ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.<br />
Major Pope resigned his Marine Corps commission in 1951. When<br />
he became president of the Workmen's Co-operative Bank in<br />
Boston in 1953, he was New England's youngest bank president.<br />
For many years, he was seen as a leader in the savings and loan<br />
industry, pioneering the use of interest-bearing checking accounts.<br />
Between 1961 and 1988, he was active on the governing board<br />
of Bowdoin College where, in 1987, he was awarded an honorary<br />
Doctor of Laws degree. In a 2002 interview, Everett Pope said:<br />
I have had a happy and satisfying life. We did what needed<br />
to be done during the war. I have no regrets, no sense of<br />
recrimination. I sometimes question the tactics. 10<br />
In 2008, failing health forced the 89-year-old and his wife to move<br />
from Florida to Maine, so that they would be nearer their sons.<br />
In January 2009, a month before their 67th wedding anniversary,<br />
Eleanor Pope passed away. Pope himself died on the morning<br />
of July 16, his ninetieth birthday. Two months later, Everett and<br />
Eleanor Pope were buried together in Arlington National Cemetery.<br />
Everett Pope very much admired Bowdoin's sixth president,<br />
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who had received the Medal of<br />
Honor for his tenacious and decisive leadership on Little Round<br />
Top at Gettysburg in 1863. Pope once declared that Chamberlain's<br />
"was a life that any one of us would be proud to emulate." The<br />
very same can be said of Everett Pope. 11<br />
Lest We Forget.<br />
Alf Batchelder<br />
Notes<br />
In writing this tribute, I have relied heavily on correspondence<br />
from several USMC veterans, including Bill Finnegan, Lou Imfeld,<br />
John Joseph, Jim Wilson, Bob Barton and Charles Kelty. I am<br />
particularly grateful to Major Everett Pope for reminiscences in<br />
his 2004 letter.<br />
(Endnotes)<br />
1 Donahue, Jim: Diary, in The Old Breed News, XLIX, no.5, October 1999, p.7.<br />
2 Leckie, Robert: Helmet For My Pillow, Ebury, <strong>2010</strong>, pp.83, 96.<br />
3 Morison, Samuel Eliot, quoted in The Old Breed News, XLIX, No.5, October 1999, p.7.<br />
4 Manchester, William: Goodbye, Darkness, London, 1980, p.182.<br />
5 McMillan, George: The Old Breed, A History of the First Marine Division in World War II,<br />
Washington, 1949, p.175.<br />
6 Goffard, Christopher: "A hero's hill that no one needed", St. Petersburg Times, August<br />
28, 2005, www.sptimes.com/2005/08/28/.../A_hero_s_hill_that_no.shtml; Leckie,<br />
Robert: op.cit., p.278.<br />
7 Fernandina Beach News-Leader, July 23, 2009.<br />
8 Stevenson, Matthew: Peleliu – A Second Generation Perspective,<br />
www.historynet.com/peleliu-a-second-generation-perspective.../1<br />
9 U.S. Naval Institute, A Hero Laid to Rest, September 15, 2009, blog.usni.org/?p=4355.<br />
10 Patrick Finelli Interview, www.pfweb.com/plf-usmc/interview-Pope-8-4-02.htm<br />
11 www.bowdoin.edu/news/.../1bowdoincampus/006436.shtml<br />
14<br />
The Yorker - <strong>Spring</strong> <strong>2010</strong>