Former Howard's owner Terry Slattery remembered by friends, associates

Mentor, advocate, father figure, role model and civic-minded friend.

Those are a few of the ways friends and associates are remembering Terry Slattery, former owner of Howard’s Athletic Goods store in Cape Girardeau. Slattery died Wednesday at his Cape Girardeau home. He was 65 years old.

Longtime friend David Gross knew Slattery for nearly 50 years and remembers watching Slattery play football for the Cape Girardeau Central High School Tigers in the early 1970s. After graduating from Cape Central, Slattery went on to Southeast Missouri State University, where he was a standout wide receiver for the Southeast Indians.

Slattery was in his third year at Southeast when Gross joined the football team, also as a wide receiver. The two were roommates during the team’s preseason summer camp.

“He was as awesome of a guy as you’re ever gonna meet,” Gross said when asked to describe his friend.

“The thing about Terry was he was so fast and smooth. It was unbelievable,” he said. “I would bust my rear end when we were running sprints and Terry would be right there with me and it was like I didn’t even push him. It was like he was gliding and I was running.”

Gross, who lives in Cape Girardeau and is a retired school principal, has kept in touch with many of his Southeast teammates on social media.

“A lot of us are still real tight, a close-knit group, and we’ve all been sharing stories about Terry,” he said.

“I never heard him complain. He was always positive and would work as hard as anybody on the team,” Gross recalled. “Even when the cards were stacked against him toward the end of his life, he never said a negative word.”

Slattery was still a Southeast student when he started working at Howard’s in 1974. At that time, the sporting goods store was on the northwest corner of Broadway and Pacific Street at 900 Broadway. In 2005, it moved across the street to 835 Broadway, where it remained until Slattery, who purchased the business in 2013, retired and the business closed last year.

James Green was a 16-year-old high school student in the mid-1980s when he started working at Howard’s.

“Terry was the manager when I started ,and by the time I left (16 years later) we were both managers,” said Green, who now lives in Clarkston, Washington, and is the pastor at Orchards Community Church in Lewiston, Idaho. “He was a huge mentor and served as a father figure for me.”

Green earned a marketing degree at Southeast, which he thought would serve him well at Howard’s.

“At one time, I thought Terry and I were going to buy Howard’s together until I was called into the ministry,” he said and remembered how Slattery mentored young athletes.

“He loved the community and was proud of having played football at SEMO,” Green recalled. “You hear this a lot and we say this a lot, but he was truly a great man and left a legacy for me and for his boys. He was the kind of guy you want for a mentor.”

Perhaps one of the most visible ways Slattery supported the community was through his volunteer service with the Cape Girardeau Parks and Recreation Department.

“He was on the parks advisory board for many years and was an icon of sports in this community for as long as I can remember,” said Penny Williams, a recreation division manager with the parks department, who remembers how she and her husband, Scott, who is also a recreation manager for the city’s parks department, took their children to Howard’s to purchase their first baseball and softball gloves.

“Everybody wanted to take their kids there to talk to Terry about sports,” she said.

“Terry was always an advocate for parks and recreation and for sports at all levels,” she continued. “He always wanted to help in any way, shape or form that he could and will be forever remembered in this community for those reasons.”

Scott Williams was a young college graduate working in sports and recreation services when he met Slattery for the first time about 30 years ago.

“He was one of the first business people I came in contact with out of college and became a very good friend over the years,” Scott Williams said.

Over the years, it wasn’t unusual to see Slattery volunteering his time to prepare the city’s ball fields for the start of another season.

“That great man touched the hearts of so many families in this community and his fingerprints are all over thousands of gloves and bats,” Scott Williams said. “He took a personal involvement in children.”

In 2017, the Cape Girardeau Parks and Recreation Department presented Slattery with a Youth Sports Lifetime Achievement Award.

“He will be sadly missed by this community and by our staff,” Scott Williams said. “He was family to us.”

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