Deceased February 9, 2013
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50th Reunion Book Entry
In Memory
Marriages are made in heaven, ’tis said, and George Slocum would swear by that. And bow to Lady Luck, too, because, like the guy in the pop standard, he found his million-dollar-baby in a 5-and10-cent store.
It was a wartime Christmas leave and, resplendent in his ensign’s uniform, George was gift-shopping at Altman’s (okay, not exactly Woolworth’s, forgive the poetic license). He wanted flannel pajamas to shield his mother from the chill of fuel rationing. When a saleslady “strolled over to wait on me, I thought the room got a little brighter and, when she spoke, I knew I had met my dream girl,” George said in a memoir.
A whirlwind courtship followed and, in April 1944, he and Sally Graham married and lived happily ever afterward, a fairy tale existence that charmed everybody. A niece, Ruth Geer of Montpelier, Vt., said they decided not to have children “because they were having so much fun together.”
George died Feb. 9, 2013, aged 94, at his longtime home in Ossining, N. Y., five years after Sally, who lived to 99. Both were “sharp as tacks until the end,” his niece said.
Born in Dobbs Ferry, N. Y., George majored in economics and political science at Amherst and got a Yale law degree. With the war, Annapolis commissioned him as a naval engineer assigned to a destroyer.
Long a corporate lawyer in Westchester County, he was also extolled by a friend, Alice Laurenson, for a post-retirement career as the founder and head of an AARP program helping seniors in Westchester County with income tax returns.
He also pursued a longtime interest in electronics with study at RCA Institute. With the flowering of the computer age, George became an invaluable techie among relatives and friends.
George Bria '38