Issue 42: Spring 2010 - Melbourne Cricket Club

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