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Remembrance
MEMORIAL MINUTE:
Sam Legg SAM LEGG died in his sleep on October 2, 2012, one month shy of his 96th birthday. Sam was born in Hackensack, N.J. on November 10, 1916, the youngest of the three children of Samuel Bradford Legg, a broker, and Alicia Bell Dowling Legg, a homemaker. Sam graduated from Yale University in 1940 with a degree in French. Born of Irish Catholic parents, he converted to Quakerism in 1941. When WWII broke out, Sam, a Conscientious Objector, was sponsored with a stipend by the American Friends Service Committee and served from August 1941 to October 1945 with the Civilian Public Service, an alternative to combat that fulfilled the military service requirement of draftees. During the war, Sam’s assignments included riding fence as a cowboy on a ranch in Montana, fighting forest fires in northern California, and serving as an orderly in a hospital ward in Minneapolis. While an orderly, he volunteered to take part in a dual purpose U.S. government starvation experiment to determine how few calories a soldier could subsist on while functioning in the field, as well as the optimum dietary requirements of European refugees. Sam’s “after” pictures, showing how emaciated he became, were featured in Life Magazine. Adversely affected by the mental aspects of starvation, Sam distractedly cut off some of the fingers of his left hand while chopping wood. Following the end of the war, Sam volunteered, again under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee, to work with
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refugees in Paris. There he met another AFSC volunteer, Edna Nichols Pusey of West Chester, Pa. They were married in Paris in November of 1948, and later settled in Baltimore’s Roland Park neighborhood. Sam and Edna both taught at Friends School of Baltimore and became increasingly active with Stony Run Friends Meeting. They also maintained membership in the France Yearly Meeting, and later in the Geneva Monthly Meeting. During their summer vacations they participated in Quaker work projects, including digging wells and installing irrigation for a farming village in rural Mexico. In January of 1954, Sam and Edna adopted Bruce and Nancy, then respectively ages five and six. In 1956, Sam was appointed Assistant Headmaster of the Quaker-affiliated Oakwood School in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where he served for four years. In September of 1960, Sam and a Quaker committee of Sandy Spring Friends Meeting (in Montgomery County, Md.) founded the now-thriving Sandy Spring Friends School. In the fall of 1964, with the school self-sustaining, the Legg family returned to Baltimore. Edna taught French and French history at the new Northern High School, and Sam signed on as Dean of Foreign Students and Admissions Counselor at Morgan State College (now University). Sam and Edna were both very active in the civil rights and voters rights movements. Sam marched in Selma, Ala., with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was also an active protester of the Vietnam War, and was arrested numerous times, including once while sitting in a “tiger cage” at the Pentagon. In 1975, Sam and Edna retired from teaching and moved to Gex, France, just outside Geneva, Switzerland. Sam became a teacher in the annual summer school organized by British Friends to educate international young Friends about the UN and United Nations NonGovernmental Agency programs. Both became very active in the Geneva Monthly and Paris Quaker Yearly Meetings, and spent much time traveling around Europe supporting the works of Quaker committees and visiting shut-ins who could not make it to their First-Day Meetings. When Edna died in Geneva in June of 1984, Sam remained in France an additional two years. In 1987, he returned to the U.S. and moved into the Broadmead retirement community with his sister, the late Alicia Bell Legg, a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Sam and Alicia quickly established themselves in the Broadmead community, and Sam resumed his energetic support of Quaker causes. He regularly attended Meeting for Worship at Stony Run Friends Meeting, where his favorite seat was a rocking chair against the eastern wall of the Meeting room. Sam loved people, and he travelled as much as he could throughout his life, visiting friends and Friends wherever he went. He strongly believed in the cause of world peace and continually worked for that goal. In the best Quaker tradition, he “let his life speak” his deep convictions. Sam is survived by his son, Bruce Michael Legg, of Great Mills, Md., and numerous nieces, nephews, and grandchildren. His daughter Nancy died in December 2011. Memorial Meetings in memory of Sam Legg were held at Baltimore Monthly Meeting of Friends, Stony Run, on October 21, 2012, and at Broadmead on Saturday, November 10, 2012. FS Contributors to this Memorial Minute: Bruce Legg, Joan Sexton, Alice Cherbonnier Reprinted courtesy of Stony Run Friends Meeting