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.
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