August 20, 1925—May 16, 2016
WILLIAM JEFFERSON LEGG was born on August 20, 1925 in Enid, Oklahoma in the home of his parents, Zella Mabel (Gensman) Legg and Garl Paul Legg, both of whom came to Oklahoma Territory as children before Statehood. Bill was the youngest child of their four children, his siblings being Theodore Gensman Legg, Dora Belle Legg, and Zella Jean (Legg) Walker.
He passed away at age 90, on May 16, 2016.
In addition to the usual boyhood recreational and foible activity, Bill, as a teenager, helped in family business enterprises and farming, and on Saturdays he was employed, for about three years, in a grocery store. He attended Enid Public Schools, skipping the third grade, and graduating at age 16 in 1942, the third youngest in a graduating class of over 500 at Enid High School. In 1942-43, he attended and graduated from Enid Business College, with honors. At age 17, Bill enlisted in the United States Navy and served on active duty for 32 months during World War II and thereafter. Selected as a Naval officer candidate in the Navy’s V-5 (aviation) and V-12 (deck) officer training programs, he was stationed at Hutchinson Naval Air Station and the Naval training units at Pittsburg State University and at the University of Texas at Austin. He completed officer training at age 20 and college in just 2 ½ years, graduating at UT in 1946 with the degree of Bachelor of Business Administration and being commissioned Ensign, and later Lieutenant JG, in the Navy Supply Corps, the logistics branch of the Navy. He remained in the Naval Reserve for 20 years.
After college and his Navy years, Bill met Eva Imogene Hill in 1948 in Bartlesville while both were employed there. They were married in the Presbyterian Church there in 1950, both 25 years of age. As he repeatedly attested through the years, here began the best half-century of Bill’s life. During that half-century, he and Imogene reared and educated their three precocious daughters, Melissa Lou, Eva Diane, Janet Sue, each to double collegiate degrees, leading to a successful professional career- philanthropic, architectural, legal. During their marriage, they belonged to and were leaders in multiple organizations, they supported and encouraged each other spiritually, physically, and financially in their separate activities; they enjoyed their joint or separate friends together; they traveled worldwide together; and they were truly one unit for 55 years, as marriage ideally can be.
After college and before law school, Bill was employed in Bartlesville by Phillips Petroleum Company in aviation (fuel) sales, and in Tulsa by the Ohio Oil Company (now Marathon) in the drilling and production Division Office. Commencing in 1950 while being employed by The Ohio full-time, he attended the University of Tulsa College of Law, graduating in 1954 with the degree of Juris Doctor, with honors. He ranked third in an original class of about 100 college graduates from many U.S. elite universities, such as MIT, UT and others, recruited nationwide by oil companies headquartered in Tulsa. Then, after passing the Oklahoma Bar Examination, he was promoted by The Ohio to company attorney, remaining as such for eight years.
Bill entered private law practice in 1962, being especially proud of his eventual law partnership with L. Karlton Mostellar, then regarded as the best business/taxation counselor in Oklahoma and beyond, eventuating into an Oklahoma City professional corporation, which grew to 55 or more lawyers plus as many other employees during the 1980’s. Bill was a “name-partner” in the Firm name for over 30 years. He served thrice as a Director and, for a time, was President of the Firm from 1982-86.
During his law practice of over 50 years, he also taught law frequently, for five years as an Adjunct Professor of oil and gas law and Oklahoma real estate law in the Oklahoma City University School of Law. He made numerous presentations in law profession-and industry-seminars coast to coast, as well as writing several legal articles for various national law publications. He was the editor-author of two legal casebooks used in law classes. At family repeated urgings, he wrote and privately distributed in the mid-1990’s his 500 page memoirs, “My Time and Space”, which is now held for use by future historians in the Oklahoma State Historical Department, from which much of the contents here have been extracted.
In his law practice, Bill was primarily engaged as a petroleum specialist, but his practice also significantly included Oklahoma real estate, local estate planning, and contested hearings before administrative agencies involving petroleum industry regulation and taxation. Litigation he handled included trial and appellate practice in federal and state courts, and once arguing a case before the United States Supreme Court, all nine Justices sitting.
As a practicing attorney, Bill represented many oil and gas producer and interstate natural gas pipeline companies in the United States, serving on several corporate Boards of Directors and holding executive positions, all as outside counsel. These, among others, included New Jersey Natural Resources Company of Wall, New Jersey, as Director and General Counsel, and three international subsidiaries of Woods Petroleum Company as Director and Vice President, representing these three companies internationally in the Middle East, Australia, and Borneo. Other international clients included several from Hong Kong, Canada, and the Channel Islands off Normandy. As part of much international travel, he circled the globe on three separate occasions, and flew British Concorde four times at twice the speed of sound, all on business.
As a business lawyer, Bill had numerous unusual experiences and visited many unusual places, such as traveling the Turkish Bosporus by private yacht while thousands of jellyfish floated between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara; being held for two days in Tehran, Iran just weeks before U.S. Embassy hostages were taken and held for 444 days; walking the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange, already in destabilization six days before the 1987 market collapse; staying at the historically famous Raffles Hotel in Singapore and at the European top-ranked Le Grand Hotel in Rome, and others east and west; riding the Bullet Train from Tokyo to Kyoto, Japan and back again, being squeezed in by the Pushers and Pullers; having dinner on the 107th floor at the World Trade Center in New York years before the 9/11 tragedy, and dinner in Washington in the infamous Watergate Complex after the Nixon debacle; attending a corporate Directors Meeting on the island of Bermuda hundreds of miles far out in the Atlantic Ocean; and personally conferring with Communist government officials in Beijing who absolutely-controlled all of China’s petroleum potential both on-shore and off-shore; and many, many other good and bad experiences, all on business trips.
In addition to practicing law, Bill held a number of ordained offices through the years in the Community of Christ whose world headquarters are in Independence, Missouri. He held Oklahoma statewide and local administrative positions in the Church for many years. He also traveled extensively for the Church in the United States coast to coast, Canada, Europe, Australia, and the South Pacific Islands. In all of this, he was self-sustaining totally, and always felt honored to participate in the Church Ministry.
He served on the Board of Trustees of Graceland University in Lamoni, Iowa, for 14 years; the Southwestern Legal Foundation (now the Center for American and International Law) Advisory Board for continuing legal education, of Dallas, Texas, for 8 years; the Board of Trustees of the OKC Metropolitan Library System Endowment Trust for 12 years; and the Board of Trustees of the American Institute of Discussion for 30 years. In addition, Bill was an active, participating member of numerous community, business, legal, and Church organizations for decades, and was included in a number of national “Who’s Who” publications such as “Who’s Who in the World” and “The Best Lawyers in America”.
Bill loved participation sports, including one shortened-season of college football; several years of AAU competitive volleyball and AAU competitive badminton; whitewater rafting and camping alongside several Western rivers, as for example, 188 miles through the Grand Canyon of Arizona; and a lifetime of table tennis and billiards competition. For 10 years, as a volunteer Physical Instructor for the OKC YMCA, he led a physical fitness class, emphasizing jogging long distances. Multi-day fishing expeditions were in western U.S. states and several in far-north Canada.
Bill and Imogene were joyously married for 55 years until her death in 2006. The family grew to include their three daughters and two sons-in-law Melissa and Robert Walker, Eva Osborne, Janet and Scott Borison; six grandchildren, Eva Ashley (and husband Brian), Graham (and wife Kristie), Cole (and wife Christina), Ian (and fiancée Becca), Madison, and Adam; and seven great grandchildren Eva Isabel, Sterling, Max, Frederick, Kylie, Emma, and Matthew, all of whom survive him.
Memorial Services will be 11:00 a.m., Saturday, June 4, 2016 at Hahn-Cook/Street & Draper Funeral Directors Chapel. Memorial contributions are suggested for the William and Imogene Legg Endowed Scholarship Fund at Graceland University, One University Place, Lamoni, Iowa 50140; or to the William and Imogene Legg Endowed Scholarship Fund at the University of Tulsa College of Law, 3120 East Fourth Place, Tulsa, OK 74104-2499.
Arrangements under the direction of Hahn-Cook/Street & Draper Funeral Directors, Oklahoma City, OK.
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