Jim Popp was a dear friend, a trusted physician, and most of all a loved father and husband.

Dr. Haar writes:

I first met Jim in the summer of 1983 when I hired him to work in my research laboratory at the Medical College of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University.  Jim had just graduated from the University of Richmond and was a bright-eyed young man eager to work hard in the lab and learn all he could about our ongoing research.  The focus of my lab was to better understand the development of the immune system in order to develop therapies that might help to correct errors that occur in various conditions. 
 
Jim was a joy to work with and quickly meshed into the group of graduate students working in the lab.  I also quickly learned that he was not only very bright but a gifted athlete, so we timed the experiments in such a way that the 90 minute incubation period came around noon when we could go off to the gym for a game of squash or racquetball.  I was always soundly beaten but if we were asked how our game went he would manage to make it sound as if it was a close match or that I had given him a lesson.   Right!!

He applied to our medical school and was accepted the next year but continued working in the lab throughout his medical training. At that time I was involved in a collaborative research project with Dr. Leonard Schultz at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine and spent part of the summer of 1984 in his lab.  Jim accompanied me and my family on that junket and bonded with our two sons who were 7 and 10 at that time.   Our boys and I would run with Jim in the evening while my wife, Nancy, prepared dinner and then we would eat together at our cottage enjoying lobster and good conversation. 

The next year I hired Jim to work on the project again at Jackson Lab for the whole summer and his efforts resulted in a couple of research publications.  He of course was the star of the Jackson Lab baseball team, and lived with a number of other summer students at “High Seas”, an early twentieth century “cottage” which is actually a huge mansion overlooking the sea. Ever after he would remark that it was one of the best summers of his life.

Jim graduated from our medical school in 1988 and went off to do a residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Florida ultimately specializing in Rheumatology.  He married Barbra Spengeman whom he met as a fellow medical resident in Anesthesiology.  Over the next nine years they were blessed with five children, a daughter Nicole and four sons, Brent, Reed, Kyle and Grant. 

In the early spring of 2006 I decided to host a reunion of the group that had been in my lab in the mid-1980’s and invited Jim along with the others to come for a weekend in April.  Jim was excited about the prospect of seeing the lab bunch after several years and was eager to see if he could arrange a trip around his and his family’s busy schedule.  

Several weeks later I received a message from Jim telling me that he had just been diagnosed with a high grade malignant sarcoma in his hamstring and would not be able to attend the reunion due to the start of chemo and radiation treatment.   He and I exchanged email messages over the next year and a half and Nancy and I went to Florida in February of 2007 to see Jim and his family. 

In May of 2007 Jim and his brother, Mark, flew to Boston for a consult with a Doctor at Dana Farber Cancer Center.  Due to inclement weather all flights out of Boston were cancelled when they were schedule to fly home.  They would not be able to leave for three days so they decided to rent a car and drive back.  At exactly the time that they were passing through Fredericksburg, Virginia I decided to call Jim on his cell phone just to check on him. We quickly arranged for them to stop by our house and I immediately left work to meet up with them.  At the same time Jim’s mother in Florida was successful in finding a flight for them out of Richmond.  We spent a delightful hour together that afternoon and Jim was in high spirits.  In all of our conversations after that we would marvel at the miracle that I called him at exactly the moment when they were only 30 minutes from our house.  It was the last time we would see each other.  He passed away August 25, 2007 at age 45. 

Jim was just an amazing person.  He pushed himself to succeed and to do his best at everything.  He was an incredible athlete at tennis, baseball, squash, racquetball, running and all other sports he attempted.  He was very competitive but only to see how good he could be and not in a mean spirited way to defeat his opponent.  He always had a smile and kind comment for everyone.  His first love was his wife and children but he was also a dedicated physician and was devoted to his patients all of whom adored him, as testified by the pages and pages of condolences posted by them.  Throughout his illness and endless treatments he continued seeing his patients for half days, including the morning the day before he died.  That was the kind of dedicated caring human being Jim was.