Rep. Tom Slater, D-Providence, listens to debate in May on a bill he sponsored to allow so-called compassion centers to dispense marijuana to Rhode Islanders who need the drug for medical purposes.

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The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

PROVIDENCE –– On a warm May day as business droned on in the House chamber and distracted lawmakers chatted in the aisles, Providence Rep. Tom Slater got slowly to his feet and the room fell silent.

Slater, pale from chemotherapy treatments, thanked his colleagues for passing a bill that would create marijuana dispensaries for chronically ill patients.

“To go through cancer, or to go through a debilitating disease, is extremely, extremely hard,” he told a rapt audience. “One day you might feel great. The next day you might have pain all over your body.”

Legislators knew he was speaking of his own battle with breast cancer that has invaded much of his body.

In that moment they too stood, applauding the frail man as he sank back into his chair. A few swiped at tears.

“That’s why we love you Representative Slater,” Majority Leader Gordon Fox said into the microphone. “You are truly a magical person. Keep on fighting brother. Keep on fighting.”

For 15 years, the unabashedly liberal representative from the West End of Providence has been a forceful voice for the poorest Rhode Islanders, winning the respect and affection of even his toughest political critics.

Despite being sick, Slater makes the trek to the State House each afternoon, often times steering his Honda from the parking lot at Rhode Island Hospital after chemotherapy to his spot on Smith Hill, so as not to miss a chance to press for change on the issues he cares most about.

“Tom Slater and I might disagree a lot of time over politics, but we laugh a lot over life,” House Minority Leader Robert Watson, a conservative East Greenwich Republican said recently. “He’s absolutely passionate about what he believes in and you have to appreciate someone who brings his beliefs to this building every day.”

TOM SLATER, 68, grew up poor in the 1940s, living with his sprawling family in a tiny cold-water flat where the Meeting Street School now meets Route 95.

His parents met as children and married as teenagers. Edie Slater was just 17 when her second of six children was born. The elder Tom Slater left a short time later for Italy to fight with the Army in World War II.

It was a hard childhood, but one Slater remembers with a certain fondness. Cereal for dinners, chilly winters huddled under thin blankets. More than once at Christmastime, volunteers from The Providence Journal-Bulletin arrived at the Slater’s apartment carrying boxes of toys they’d collected for poor families.

“We never cared too much for fancy things. I still don’t,” Slater would write in a letter to his Elmwood constituents years later. “I believe that having a loving family and doing things for other people is more important than a new car, or expensive clothes.”

In that same note, he summarized a political philosophy that took root in those early years: “I believe that those of us who have made it out of poverty have a responsibility to help others who are trying.”

Slater went on to attend La Salle Academy and put himself through Johnson & Wales College, joining the Marines and later marrying his own sweetheart, Jody McKiernan, before settling into fatherhood on Sawyer Street, while working as a salesman for a hydraulics company. He lost his first campaign for City Council in the 1960s.

In 1994, he tried again, running for state representative. By then his three children were grown and the neighborhood had evolved from a mostly Irish enclave to a largely black and Latino area that stretches from the lawns of Roger Williams Park to the hectic blocks of Cranston Street.

The incumbent was a Republican woman whose conservative views proved a tough fit for the West End and Elmwood. Slater won on a simple promise that he would do what he could to make life in a tough district easier.

Since his election, he has followed through on that pledge, sponsoring hundreds of bills to expand health care for uninsured children and families. He led the charge for a 2006 bond initiative to build more affordable housing, fought to extend the RIteCare program and became the chief voice behind financing for a new Training School.

ON A RECENT MORNING, Slater stopped by the West Elmwood Housing Development Corporation’s Cranston Street office on one of his frequent rounds of the neighborhood. Executive Director Sharon Conard-Wells greeted him with a hug and once-over, asking about his health before pelting him with questions on a foreclosure bill.

“He’s never really been an elected official politician type,” she said later. “… I was never so impressed as when he took the time to explain to a resident group in the West End how to make a law and how a bill becomes a law. … Tom took the time to empower people, to educate people.”

When elderly constituents need a ride to the pharmacy, or the doctor, Slater has been known to take them — he even bought a late 1980s Dodge passenger van for easier transport. If they need something at the supermarket, he drives them there, too.

“You can’t live in a neighborhood and not take care of the people you represent,” Slater explains. “If they need help you have to get that. You can’t allow them to starve. You can’t allow them to go without heat and hot water.”

But Conard-Wells has seen enough politicians to know that Slater is anything but typical, which is why she nominated him for a national NeighborWorks Government Service Award this spring, staying up late to finish the application because there was just so much to say. He won the award and will be honored in Washington, D.C. this fall.

It is that sense of dedication that constituents say keeps Slater winning in a predominately Latino district.

“Tom has been the voice of people who have had no voice for a very long time,” said Frank Corbishley, director of Providence Community Action, on a midday visit with Slater to a GED program for pregnant teens. “He’s fought every cause that needs to be fought. He works tirelessly nights and weekends. People talk about the [Rhode Island] legislature very badly, but not about Tom.

“He’s criticized sometimes by people who don’t understand what it is to be poor, that it’s not a life choice, it is a situation that occurs and Tom understands that,” Corbishley said. “If being poor was really great, everyone would be buying time shares in Hartford [Park] projects instead of Acapulco.”

IN HIS 15 YEARS at the State House, Slater has risen to a prominent seat on the House Finance Committee, as chairman of its Human Services subcommittee, and fallen into an easy camaraderie with the current leadership team, including House Speaker William J. Murphy.

But no one on Smith Hill is closer to Slater than House Finance Committee Chairman Steven M. Costantino, who can talk for hours about his good friend, laughing affectionately as he recalls the funnier moments they have spent together. “What makes Tom so special is that he is so very ordinary,” Costantino said. “His life is familiar to many people who have their daily struggles and continue on.”

After the finance chairman suffered a heart attack a decade ago, it was Slater who borrowed a key to Costantino’s house and regularly let himself in to see that his friend, who lived alone, was keeping up with his medications.

Over the years, even Slater’s political foes have warmed to him.

When East Providence Republican and Finance Committee member John Savage met Slater, he saw him as a liberal Democrat whose views didn’t much match his own. It was a short-lived impression.

“He started to soften me considerably,” Savage recalls. “He would engage me in conversations out of the political spectrum, in his office or in the back of House Finance. I started to see the depth of the man and I saw, wow, this guy is good.”

On the issue of medical marijuana, for example, Savage had long opposed the idea of legalizing the drug for people with serious illnesses, reasoning that it would only enable criminals. But when Slater took over sponsorship of the bill, he spent time convincing colleagues that it wasn’t about drugs. It was about easing the pain of the sickest Rhode Islanders, about making their fight a little easier.

In 2006, Savage ultimately voted in favor of legalizing medical marijuana. This May he voted to create marijuana dispensaries.

“Whenever I’m talking to Tom, I get a great sense of personal integrity,” Savage said. “Sometimes our views are different, but Tom is willing to sit and listen. And there is a lack of self-interest there. If he could step out of the limelight he would.”

THERE WAS A TIME when Slater’s constant presence at the State House drove his wife, Jody, crazy. Some weeks during the session it felt like she never saw her husband of 38 years at all.

“Now I’m so happy to see him go when he has the strength because of the cancer,” she said Friday, her voice unsteady. “He says he doesn’t feel any pain up there. He’s doing what he loves.”

After a relatively rare diagnosis of male breast cancer in the 1990s, Slater was cancer free until two days before his daughter’s wedding in May 2003 when he learned it was back.

Since then it’s been dizzying rounds of chemotherapy and radiation — treatments that over six years have thinned his frame and cost him his hair. Despite the treatments, the cancer has spread to his lungs, prostate, lower back, bones, lymph nodes, eyes and now his brain.

He’s been told that the cancer is incurable, that the doctors are focusing on quality of life.

There have been good times, like last summer, when he was sprung from chemo, allowing him to campaign door to door.

A few weeks ago, Slater shared his hope that this summer too would offer a break. But then came tough news. The chemo will continue.

It’s a directive he’s heard before. None of it keeps him from the State House.

“You’ve got to keep busy and you have to do what you need to for your constituents,” he said. “With cancer you can’t just rest and relax, you have to keep your mind occupied and that’s what I try to do. If I have a problem, I’ll deal with it when I have to, but if I don’t have a problem, I’m going to continue to enjoy life as it is. … Do I wish it had happened differently? Sure. But am I angry? No, I’m not angry.”

These days, Slater looks tired. His hair is gone and his voice is scratchy but he’s still there nearly every afternoon, budget documents stacked on his thin legs as he sits in Finance Committee hearings, television cameras rolling. He’s still battling for new housing and better health care. He’s still wrestling against cuts to the disabled.

Tom Slater is still fighting.

cneedham@projo.com