Personal
On September 5, 1931, he married Katherine Elizabeth "Kay" Hanson (1907–1979), whom he had dated since high school, at Saint Malachy's Roman Catholic Church in Manhattan. They had two children: Therese O'Malley Seidler (born in 1933) and Peter O'Malley (born in 1937). Kay had been diagnosed with laryngeal cancer in 1927 before the engagement and had to have her larynx removed. She was unable to speak above a whisper the rest of her life. Edwin O'Malley encouraged Walter to break off his engagement, and after Walter refused his parents did not attend the wedding. O'Malley was a smoker, who golfed occasionally, but more commonly gardened for recreation. In 1944, he remodelled his parents' summer house in Amityville, New York and relocated his family there from Brooklyn. The house was next door to the house Kay had grown up and her parents lived next door.
As a family man, he attended church regularly, attended Peter's football games at LaSalle Academy, chaperoned his daughter's dances. On summer weekends he took the family sailing on his boat, which was named Dodger.
Read more about this topic: Walter O'Malley
Famous quotes containing the word personal:
“In contrast with envy, which usually occurs between two people and is focused upon another person’s qualities or possessions, jealousy occurs when a third person becomes a threat to a dyad. Jealousy involves the loss or the impending loss of a relationship that one wants to hold onto, a relationship that is vital to personal fulfillment and claimed as one’s own.”
—Carol S. Becker (b. 1942)
“There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
—Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)