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:
“Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly you find—at the age of fifty, say—that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about.... It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.”
—Agatha Christie (1891–1976)
“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)