E. Leo Slaggie

7/25/1935 - 8/20/2024

E. Leo Slaggie, a retired Government lawyer with a lifelong passion for outdoor adventure, died on August 20 in hospice care at the Kensington, an assisted living and memory care facility near his home in Falls Church, Virginia. He was 89.
For many years Deputy Solicitor of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, he wrote briefs, argued cases, and was a teacher and mentor to a generation of younger lawyers.
Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1935, Leo at one point conceived a desire to have a steak dinner at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. After writing to the management and receiving its assurance that it would accommodate a minor traveling alone, he used money earned from a paper route to buy a train ticket to New York, check into the hotel, and satisfy his ambition. In his letter, he had probably not volunteered the fact that he was twelve.
In 1952, at 16, he entered Harvard, where he majored in physics. In his junior year, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, a distinction reserved for the top eight students in a class of 1150, and won the silver medal in debating. Graduating summa cum laude in 1956, he was awarded a scholarship given annually to "the most distinguished scholar in the Senior Class who also holds a stipendiary scholarship." He never talked about any of these honors; if friends learned of them at all, it was by an internet search.
After Harvard, he took a doctorate in physics at Berkeley, and for nine years worked in academic settings and in private industry, much of that time in Southern California. He often surfed before work, and to his delight, a baby sea lion once hopped onto his surfboard and rested there for a while. A licensed pilot, he joined the Flying Samaritans, ferrying patients from medically underserved communities of Baja California to hospitals in the U.S.. He continued to fly into his 70's.
Deciding that he would never be a world-class physicist, Leo in 1972 enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he worked with the Harvard Voluntary Defenders, with clients in prisons and institutions for the criminally insane. In Walpole State Prison, he was introduced to Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, whom he recalled as having an alarmingly powerful handshake. He received his law degree in 1975 and joined the NRC's Office of General Counsel that year. He worked there into his 70's, retiring only when the NRC introduced mandatory drug testing, to which he objected on principle.
An inherited condition caused Leo to become fully deaf by the age of 40. He was a passionate advocate of research into the cause and cure of deafness, a field he thought received insufficient attention. For several decades, until a cochlear implant restored some of his hearing, he relied solely on his formidable ability to read lips. His greatest strength was in appellate advocacy. For the benefit of attorneys with hearing loss, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals at some point installed equipment by which, as the court reporter typed, a crawl of text crossed a screen at the lectern. Leo was once arguing a case when the equipment failed, just at the moment that a judge asked a question on an abstruse point of law that no one had expected to arise. Without missing a beat, he launched into a lengthy and learned discussion of the issue.
If Leo was silent about his academic achievements, he was happy to talk about his exploits in the outdoors. With the Harvard Mountaineering Club, he was involved in some first ascents in the mountains of southeastern Alaska and the Yukon. In July 1958, after a two-week hike to reach the foot of Mt. St. Elias – at 18,008 feet, the second highest peak in North America – he and three other climbers began their ascent, but were forced by bad weather to camp at around 11,500 feet. Heavy snowfall and a new Army tent with a flawed design caused Leo and his tentmate to wake up gasping for air. Clawing his way to the surface, Leo passed out, and by the time they were found, he was badly frostbitten and his tentmate had suffocated.
It took four days to bring Leo down the mountain to a glacier where a plane could land. The first medic to see him diagnosed gangrene in the affected toes, and he was evacuated to Juneau, where a surgeon told him that the only question was how extensive an amputation would be required. In the end, this proved unnecessary, and after two weeks recovering in the hospital, he was released. The experience did nothing to diminish his enthusiasm for climbing, and he continued to scale mounains all over the world, including the Matterhorn, Mt. Kilimanjaro, and peaks in the Alps and Andes.
Impelled by curiosity, Leo once found a staircase leading to the roof of the NRC's 18-story headquarters in Rockville, where the door locked behind him. Finding a rope, he rappelled down the side of the building, a sheer drop of 250 feet to the pavement, to a niche, two floors down, from which a porch gave access to the building. This exploit he kept to himself.
An avid whitewater kayaker on the most challenging rivers of Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, he was a regular at Mather Gorge, on the Potomac, and once ran Great Falls in a kayak. He liked nothing more than to introduce others to the pleasures of rock climbing. Among his other outdoor pleasures were downhill and cross-country skiing, scuba diving, ice hockey, karate, cycling, riding classic motorcycles, and road racing. In his 50's, he took lessons at a racetrack in West Virginia to learn how to drive his BMW competitively.
Leo was a voracious reader, and wrote reviews, for his own use only, of every book he read. Music was also a passion; despite his failing hearing, he took up the piano in his 30's. He was a devotee of steam trains, rail travel in general, the radio programs of his youth, and the New York Review of Books.
Over the years, Leo's pets included a cherished border collie, named D.C.; an iguana, Godzilla; and Ancient Pistol, a California desert tortoise, legally acquired, who died recently after 66 years in his care. (The name came from Shakespeare's Henry IV.) He was a soft touch for any animal in need. When a friend's purchase of a pygmy hedgehog proved ill-advised, Leo provided Spike a home for the rest of his days.
Leo was a life member of both the ACLU and the NRA.
His capacity for lightning repartee was famous. Last October, a friend said to him, "You had the quickest wit of anyone I've ever known." "Still do," he shot back. Only days before his death, a therapist at the Kensington mentioned that her husband was also a lawyer. "I'm very sorry to hear it," he replied.
Leo had memorized an enormous amount of poetry and plays, which he could recite brilliantly. It is ironic that while in what officially was a memory care unit, he recently regaled a group with a letter-perfect and beautifully delivered rendition of the St. Crispin's Day speech from Shakespeare's Henry V.
Leo was divorced, and had no children. He is survived by Phoebe Hamill, his friend and companion of many decades. A legion of friends will treasure his memory.
A memorial service is not currently planned.