Harold G. Slovic

Harold G. Slovic

Reno - June 23, 1946 - March 20, 2021

Harold ("Hal") G. Slovic, of Reno, Nevada, died on Saturday, March 20, 2021, of complications resulting from throat cancer. He was 74 years old.

He grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, and attended the University of Michigan, where he received a prestigious Hopwood Award for poetry in 1965 as a freshman. He eventually transferred to Roosevelt University in Chicago and earned a bachelor's degree in psychology. Later, he earned a degree in electronics from DeVry Institute of Technology and then worked as a research technician at Bell Labs in New Jersey and the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1980, he met Kambe Yasue from Toyota City, Japan, when she was visiting the United States as part of a tour group from Japan. She encouraged him to come to Toyota City and explore the possibility of teaching English there. He took her advice and found work at the Toyota Motor Corporation before eventually becoming a Professor of English at Aichi Gakusen University. He and Yasue were married in 1986 and lived in Toyota City until they moved to Reno in 2011. She passed away on February 2nd of this year. Yasue was an excellent gardener, bagel-maker, and violinist, who loved reading biographies of mountaineers in English in her spare time.

Hal was a renaissance man. Although he supported himself and Yasue by teaching English, he was always a lover of literature, art, music, and science. He continued to write beautiful poetry throughout his life, including a final poem in response to Yasue's death. He was also a printmaker and a builder of unique artistic boxes, many of them including moving parts and lights, sometimes even music. He contributed to numerous group art exhibitions in Toyota City, receiving several Excellence Prizes in the Toyota Citizens Art Exhibition during the 1990s. In his later years, he opened the Ari Ari ("Little Ants") Gallery at his home in Reno to local art lovers during the annual Artown festival. Hal was also an accomplished pianist, who received a Superior Rating at the National Federation of Music Clubs Festival in Reno in 2018.

Most importantly, Hal was a curious, kind, and generous person, much loved by his students, colleagues, friends, and family. He is survived by his older brother Paul Slovic, of Eugene, Oregon, by two sisters-in-law, by Yasue's two daughters, her son, and their children in Japan, and by several nephews, their wives, a niece, and their children in Oregon, California, and Brazil. Another brother, David Slovic, died in 2018.