Victor Neal

Victor Neal was a physician, anesthesiologist and Army veteran who spent most of his working life in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after growing up on a farm in the small town of Wanette. He died on October 13, 2026, in Tulsa at the age of 93, and his death was announced through a family obituary published by the Tulsa World.

Neal was born on January 16, 1933, in Wanette, Oklahoma, the youngest child of Henry Neal and Mamie Hardin Neal. By the time he died he was the last surviving member of his generation of the family, the last of his first cousins still living. According to his family's obituary, he graduated as valedictorian of his class at Wanette and went on to earn his medical degree from the University of Oklahoma Medical School in 1957. Decades later, in 2008, he also completed an undergraduate degree at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, a detail his family described as a story worth telling in its own right.

Neal's career combined medicine and military service. He served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War, reaching the rank of Captain and serving in Saigon before being posted to Fort Carson in Colorado. After his military service he settled in Tulsa, where he helped establish an anesthesia practice at a small hospital on the edge of the city alongside colleagues named Bennett and Wenger. Because the more senior physicians in the group were unavailable, it was Neal, the most junior doctor in the practice, who ended up administering the first anesthesia given at Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa. He went on to practice for years with Associated Anesthesiologists in the city.

After retiring from medicine, Neal did not slow down. He became what his family called a working farmer and rancher, running cattle with his wife, Mary Shepherd Neal, in Okmulgee County, Oklahoma. He was married to Mary for 55 years before her death, and the couple had five sons, Dan, Ron, Tom, Richard and Pete. One of the proudest moments of his later years, according to the family, came when his granddaughter, Aubrey Neal, graduated from medical school and, as a Major, signed the commissioning papers making a grandson an Army physician in turn, a small full-circle moment linking three generations of the family to both medicine and the military.

News of Neal's death drew tributes from family members who remembered him as a devoted husband, father and grandfather whose life spanned farm, war and hospital. A memorial service is scheduled to be held at Boston Avenue Methodist Church's Rose Chapel in Tulsa, with arrangements handled by Ninde Funeral and Cremation. Readers searching for him today are most likely looking for confirmation of his death, his age, and the basic facts of a long life that touched rural Oklahoma, wartime Vietnam, and decades of Tulsa medicine.