Howard B. Gist, Jr.

Howard Battle Gist, Jr. (September 17, 1919 – August 19, 2011), was like his father, Howard, Sr., and his son, Howard "Trey", III, an attorney in his native Alexandria, Louisiana. Prior to 1973, he was the Alexandria city attorney in three mayoral administrations; like his father, he was a president of the Louisiana Bar Association.

Family background

Gist's father was born on January 15, 1882, in Beebe in White County in north central Arkansas. In 1918,he married the former Marsolina Eugenia Luckett, known as Marcie Eugenie Gist (1881-1947), the daughter of Robert Leven Luckett (1837-1895), a physician and U.S. marshal in Rapides Parish, Louisiana.

The senior Gist attended public schools in White County and what is now Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia in Clark County in south Arkansas. He worked thereafter in a [...] store for ten years to save money to attend the legal department at Tulane University in New Orleans, now the Tulane University Law School, from which he graduated in 1911. He then relocated to Alexandria. In 1917, he became a member of firm of Thornton, Gist & Richey, years later Gist and Methvin. Much of his work dealt with insurance law.

Education and military service

Gist, Jr., attended public schools in Alexandria and graduated in 1936 from Bolton High School in the Alexandria Garden District. He then attended Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia and graduated from Tulane University with a Bachelor of Arts and then a Juris Doctor from Tulane University School of Law. He was a member of the Kappa Alpha Order. He was also affiliated with Phi Delta Phi.

While still in law school, Gist volunteered for the United States Navy. He obtained a commission through the Naval Communication School at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He reached the rank of lieutenant in the United States Naval Reserve. He was assigned to both the Atlantic and the Pacific Theater of Operations during World War II. He served on the USS Nuthatch (AM-60) and from 1944 to 1945 the USS West Virginia (BB-48). Gist fought in the recapture of the Philippine Islands in 1944, Iwo Jima, and the Leyte Gulf. Near the end of hostilities, he was transferred to the office of the nJudge Advocate General in Coronado, near San Diego, California.

Legal career

In 1946, Gist returned to Alexandria to join his father's firm. He had been admitted to the bar three years earlier prior to his active military service. For many years, he was a law partner of, among others, DeWitt T. Methvin, Jr. Until his death, Gist maintained an active civil law practice in the fields of medical malpractice defense, workers' compensation, product liability law, banking, and municipal law. He was the Alexandria city attorney under the administrations of Carl B. Close, W. George Bowdon, Jr., and Ed Karst. One of the Gist-Methvin legal secretaries, Jackie Pope Adams (1922-2013), a native of Marion County, Mississippi, was the secretary to the Alexandria City Council and the city clerk after adoption in 1977 of the municipal home rule charter. Gist was the attorney, a director, and for sixteen years the chairman of the board of Security First National Bank in Alexandria, established in 1927 but since part of Regions Bank.

Gist was a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and was instrumental in the formation of the Louisiana Association of Defense Attorneys, of which he was subsequently the president. He was a past president of the Alexandria Bar Association and from 1977 to 1978 headed the Louisiana Bar Association, a position which his father had also filled from 1946 to 1947. He was listed in the original publication of The Best Lawyers in America. In 1969, he was elected to the Council of Louisiana State Law Institute.

Personal life

Gist was a Roman Catholic and in the Knights of Columbus. He served on several boards and was an active hunter and fisherman.

Gist and his wife, the former Rosemary Flynn (born September 1927), had six children: Alexandria attorney Howard Battle "Trey" Gist, III, Marcie Elizabeth Gist, Mary Stephanie Gist Novakovich, Robert Christopher Gist, Ellen Kyle Gist Scroggs, and William McGowan Gist. Gist is interred at Greenwood Memorial Park in Pineville, Louisiana.

His son, Howard Gist, III (born 1951), a 1977 graduate of the Louisiana State University Law Center, still maintains the Gist law office at 4119 Parliament Drive in Alexandria.