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:
“A man who has nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the existing of better men than himself.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
“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)
“I leave the governor’s office next week, and with it public life ... [which] has been on the whole a pleasant one. But for ten years and over my salaries have not equalled my expenses, and there has been a feeling of responsibility, a lack of independence, and a necessary neglect of my family and personal interests and comfort, which make the prospect of a change comfortable to think of.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)