The phone rang the other day, and it was Jenny Lawrence calling from her home in New York City.
"Walter would have been 92 this week," she said.
The Walter she was referring to was Walter Lord, more formally John Walter Lord Jr., the author born and raised in Baltimore who sparked the Titanic craze with the publication in 1955 of his book, "A Night to Remember."
Lawrence, an author and editor, recently published "The Way It Was: Walter Lord on His Life and Books," a memoir she assembled from unpublished autobiographical material he had left behind after his death in 2002, and tape-recorded sessions she had made and transcribed in the mid-1980s.
Lawrence, who has a bachelor's degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley and a master's in journalism from New York University, conducted extensive interviews with Lord in his apartment at 116 E. 68th St. in New York City, over lunch during the winter of 1987 and spring of 1988.
This was no ordinary interview because she had been intimately acquainted with the celebrated author since childhood.
Lord was an honorary uncle who had been a familiar and close member of her Washington family when Lawrence was growing up. Lord spent every Christmas with her family from the late 1940s to 2000.
"My father and Walter were friends at Princeton and Yale Law School, plus both shared an interest in the Civil War," she said.
Readers and fans of Lord will find much revelatory and heretofore unknown biographical material in Lawrence's book.
Baltimoreans will also find much that is interesting about his time here and especially his somewhat awkward family life, which was marked by the early deaths of a father he never really knew and a sister of whom he wrote, "I don't remember a single conversation with her."
His maternal grandfather, Richard Curzon Hoffman, who became president of the Seaboard Airline Railroad, was something of a bearded, cigar-smoking ogre who was a "terrifying figure" to his grandson.
"I can't remember his ever saying a word to me," Lord recalled.
When his grandfather died in 1925, he wrote, "His obituary in the Baltimore Sun noted an impressive number of clubs he belonged to and a remarkable absence of charities."
