His story
He could fix anything, win a sprint, and have the whole room laughing while he did it.
Allen Templeton Slaughter was born on April 9, 1955, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Kensington, Maryland. His mother, Gudrun, had come to America from Germany; she and his father, Blair B. Slaughter Sr., both worked for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Allen was the middle of three brothers, between Blair Jr. and Edwin.
In the 1970s, when cycling was catching on in the D.C. area, it was Allen’s older brother Blair who got hooked first, and he talked his younger brothers into coming out to one of the Rock Creek Park criteriums.
That was all it took. Allen and Ed were hooked, and the two of them went on to race for the National Capital Velo Club, NCVC Georgetown.
Riders ‘Slaughtered’ in Durham
“The stage was set for Slaughter’s explosive burst, which sent him hurtling around Jewell and Shook for the victory.”
Velo-news · May 1977
Allen wasn’t a big guy, but he was strong and fast, and he could dominate a bike. If he broke off the front and it came down to a sprint, that was it; the win was his.
Home away from home became The Bicycle Place, then in the Wildwood Shopping Center off Old Georgetown Road.
The roller races were the winter training highlight, and working at the shop was the perfect place to develop his mechanical feel: tuning bikes, building wheels, and learning the nuances of European frame geometry.
Another reason to hang around the Wildwood Shopping Center was a sweet young lady named Clare, who worked at the laundromat. She was it for him. Allen and Clare married on December 9, 1978, and shared 47 years together, raising two daughters in Germantown, Maryland.
The bike never really left him. Through the 1990s he came back to racing, lining up through his thirties and into his forties.
He rode for a few teams over those years and sometimes on his own, but more often than not the name across his chest was The Bicycle Place, the shop that started it all.
Allen found his way into the electrical trade. In 1978 he was accepted into IBEW Local 26’s selective “A” apprenticeship, the Inside Wireman program. Anyone in the trade knows how few made it in, and how much tougher it was to finish at all. Allen graduated valedictorian, at the very top of his class.
From there he built a successful career at Dynalectric Company. Allen was widely respected across the industry, a man who could build rapport with anyone and whose reputation was a testament to how he treated the people around him. He worked on massive government projects and highly technical data centers, and retired in 2018 as a Senior Vice President of Commercial Construction.
He had a rare mechanical intuition. He could look at almost anything — a structure, a machine, a problem — and simply understand how it worked and how to make it better. Whenever he traveled, he was fascinated by the infrastructure around him: the buildings, the subways, the materials, how things were put together. His mind never stopped.
His family rarely needed a repairman, because Allen fixed everything. Plumbing, wiring, a finished basement, and more patched holes in Sarah and Peggy’s first apartment walls than anyone could count. And he made it all look easy.
More impressive than the racing and the career was his sense of humor, his big smile, an even bigger laugh, and his back scratches. The man could give a killer back scratch.
He was so funny. Genuinely, colorfully hilarious. He had a unique way of looking at the world, finding the ridiculous in things and poking at it with a tapestry of words no one else would ever think to string together. Some people walked away scratching their heads, but the rest were on the floor.
And his laugh — big, unapologetic, unmistakable, and just the best. When he really got going you could hear it through the entire house; it didn’t just fill a room, it shook the walls. His smile was the same way, a giant, split-tooth grin that lit up his whole face. If he caught your eye from across a room and flashed it at you, it made you feel like the most special person there. That smile told you he thought you were something, and that meant everything.
When he retired, Allen and Clare moved to Aiken, South Carolina, to a house right on the 15th hole of a golf course. Those were the only two things he wanted out of retirement — golf and the bike — and in Aiken he had both year round.
He and Clare made wonderful friends there, and spent their days on shared rounds of golf, glasses of whisky, and a whole lot of laughing. He loved to travel to see his family, and loved even more when his grandsons, Erik and Lukas, came to visit him.
Allen had always been a solid guy — strong, and full of life. So when a rather large tumor was found in the left temporal region of his brain, it knocked everyone off their feet.
He met it head on. After surgery, chemo, and radiation, he got back on the bike and back on the golf course — not with the same vigor, but back in action, the best he could. He held the cancer at bay for about two years, until early 2026, when it began to progress. He met the end the same way he met everything else: with strength and dignity, and with the people he loved most beside him.
Draft copy · awaiting Sarah’s review and final photos
