Page 25 - The First Fifty Years
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               DRIVEN  19

Review, John O’Quinn69 towered above them all—not always to
their comfort—by virtue of both his physical stature and his
sometimes outlandish appetites and professional achievements.70

      O’Quinn was raised by his father, who ran an auto repair shop
near Houston’s Rice University. His alcoholic mother had deserted
the family when O’Quinn was four years old.71 He enrolled at Rice,
where he accumulated 90 hours of credit, accompanied by at best
middling grades earned amidst off-and-on probation. He never
graduated.72 It didn’t matter. Under the Blakely Rules then in force
at the University of Houston College of Law, a degree was not
required. Ninety credit hours and C (or thereabouts) was good
enough for admission.

      Fortunately for himself and the law, O’Quinn caught fire at
UH, pushing not only himself but everyone around him
tremendously hard. He became Editor in Chief of Houston Law
Review (not only presiding over the expansion of the publication
from three issues per volume to four, but also adding HLR’s first
effort resembling a modern symposium issue).73 After specially
petitioning to be allowed both service on the Review and
participation in advocacy competitions (a practice forbidden by
College of Law regulations but allowed by the administration in
O’Quinn’s instance), he won a national moot court competition.74 He
finished first in his class.

      O’Quinn proved to be a bigger-than-life, big-case lawyer. He
won enormous verdicts in gas royalty disputes and breast implant
cases and was a major participant in the class action that extracted
billions of dollars for the State of Texas from Big Tobacco. He
celebrated his successes with extravagant Christmas parties. But
he also “dealt daily with personal demons and addictions.”75

      Not everyone liked John O’Quinn. Many physicians hated
him because of the breast implant litigation, a fact that opened
him to speculation that he “must have enjoyed great
satisfaction when he funded a Texas Medical Center building
with his name attached.”76 He was also a tenacious, even
ferocious, advocate and more than once was accused of playing
too close to, or across, the line in pursuit of success in his
practice.

      One of O’Quinn’s great loves (perhaps not surprisingly in
light of his growing-up years)—and one at which he felt
compelled, as he did with everything in his life, to succeed—
was assembling what became one of the nation’s most
impressive collections of antique cars. In all, he amassed more
than 800 vehicles, including both enormously expensive
classics (Lamborghini, Rolls-Royce, Duesenberg, and even a
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