Bill Slater

Educator, sportscaster and a longtime voice on Paramount newsreels, Bill Slater graduated from the United States Military Adacemy in 1924 and earned a master's degree in political science from Columbia University. He then joined the Greenbrier Military Adademy in Lewisburg, West Virginia as commandant of cadets and later became head of the mathematics department and football coach at Blake School for Boys in Minneapolis, Minnesota. While at Blake, a father persuaded Bill to broadcast a local football game, and his career as a sportscaster was thence initiated. At Adelphi Academy, Brooklyn, NY, he was headmaster between 1933 and 1942; while there, Ted Husing asked him to help broadcast an Army-Navy game on CBS. He covered the Berlin Olympiad for NBC in 1936, and the next year he emceed NBC's "Uncle Jim's Question Bee". He joined the US Army in 1942, serving as a lieutenant colonel in public relations. Later he announced tennis from Wimbledon and Forest Hills, races at Indianapolis, and Big Ten football as well as the popular "Luncheon at Sardi's" and "Dinner at Sardi's" radio series, at times with his wife Marion. They lived at 39 Woodbine Avenue in Larchmont, New York, and Bill Slater, the well-liked sportcaster turned radio-TV personality, succumbed in 1965 after a ten-year illness.