Opala celebrates 40 years in state

WILLIAM F. O'BRIEN
The Edmond Sun

EDMOND April 03, 2006 11:24 pm

— In the 14th Century a group of Tartars were given allotments of land in the Kingdom of Poland as a reward for their military service to the Kingdom. Those Tartars were Muslim horsemen who had been part of the Mongol horde, but over time their descendants were gradually assimilated in the life and culture of Poland. And one of them, Marian Opala, currently serves as a Justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court.
Opala was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1921, and his father was a prosperous banker. Opala speaks fondly of his comfortable middle class youth in pre-war Poland, where he developed a fluency in French, German and English. But that way of life was irrevocably shattered in 1939 as the Second World War began when Germany invaded his homeland. After Poland was defeated, Opala managed to make his way to Istanbul, Turkey — which was a neutral nation — where he was able to enlist in the British Army.
In 1944 he was airdropped into Poland by the British to support an armed uprising against the Nazis and was captured by the German Army. As a prisoner of war Opala was transferred to a camp in Germany that was subsequently liberated by American forces. Opala recalls how a friendship he developed with an American Captain from Oklahoma, Clyde Gene Warr, who oversaw the liberation of his camp would change his life. As a result of the agreement reached at Yalta before the end of the war, Poland was consigned to the Russian sphere of influence, and in 1945 it was being transformed into a communist state.
Opala sadly confided to his new American friend Capt. Warr that he could not return to Poland, and he would probably relocate to somewhere in the British Commonwealth. Warr suggested he come to Oklahoma to begin a new life and that he would assist him in that effort. After much soul searching, Opala decided to take Warr up on his offer.
After arriving in Oklahoma City in 1947, Opala attended Oklahoma City University School of Law and graduated in 1953. He later returned to OCU and received a degree in economics in 1957. And he subsequently journeyed to New York City to attend New York University School of Law and was awarded a Master’s of Law from that institution in 1968.
Opala began his legal career as an assistant county attorney in Oklahoma County and held that position until 1956 when he began a private law practice, with a concentration on insurance law. After four years as a private attorney, Opala began his career in public service as a referee for the Oklahoma Supreme Court in 1960, a position he would hold until 1965, when he became the staff attorney for Supreme Court Justice Rooney McInerney. During that time, it became apparent to the Supreme Court and many district court judges that Oklahoma needed an office to coordinate the actions and operations of the courts, and the position of court administrator was created in 1968. Opala was urged by Justice McInerney and the Chairman of the State Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Grantham, to apply for that position, and he was appointed to it by the Supreme Court in 1968.
In 1977 he was appointed to the Oklahoma Workers Compensation Court, and in the following year Gov. David Boren appointed him to fill a vacancy on the State Supreme Court that was created when the Justice who represented District 3, which includes Oklahoma City, retired. He served as Chief Justice of the Court for two years in the early 1990s. Opala reports he has greatly enjoyed his tenure on the court, and speaks with affection and admiration about the other justices he has served with. His thorough and incisive legal decisions have been read by a generation of Oklahoma lawyers and law students and are increasingly finding their way into the books that are part of the texts used by law schools.
And Marian Opala believes that it has been a privilege and an honor to spend 40 years serving the people of the state that gave him a new life in a free country.