Born in Memphis, Tennessee, his voice became nationally known as the narrator of the popular TV series Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. He worked as a news broadcaster, actor and spokesman for radio and television commercials, industrials and government films, and voiced hundreds of commercials for national advertisers over his career.
He began his radio and TV career in the South in the late 1940s, after service in World War II. He moved to Chicago in 1960, was elected to the Local board in 1964 and served as local president from 1968 — 1977. Slattery was also a national vice president for six years before stepping up to the top job in the fall of 1976, becoming the first AFTRA national president from outside New York or Los Angeles.
At the AFTRA National Convention in Minneapolis, the newly elected Slattery expressed the challenges awaiting him and his philosophy: “The complexity of our business and of our contracts, and the diversity of our needs are bound to cause us problems, and they do. Only through the strength of a really united union can these problems be solved. Needs and problems are what a union is about, and they are relative of course. My needs are very important to me, and your problems are very important to you. That does not mean that they should be trivial and inconsequential to someone else. I hope for AFTRA, and pledge insofar as I am able to implement my hope, that all our needs and all our problems will be yours and mine and this union’s, in terms of common concern and a will to solve them.”
On Dec. 19, 1978, Slattery led the union in a joint strike with Screen Actors Guild against the American Association of Advertisers and the Association of National Advertisers over radio and TV commercials. He was quoted during the strike declaring that the unions had been chosen as “targets for the new management goal of a union-free environment for the 1980s.”
He was a trustee of the Health and Retirement Funds for 22 years and was honored with George Heller Memorial Gold Card No. 27 at the 1983 AFTRA National Convention in Pittsburgh. One of his sons was four-time Emmy-winning TV news reporter John Slattery, who died in 2014 at age 63, just five years after his father.