Lord, who was born Oct. 8, 1917, was the son of John Walterhouse Lord, a Baltimore attorney, and Henrietta M. Hoffman, a self-absorbed socialite who reveled in being the center of attention at salons she held Sunday afternoons in her Roland Park home. Lord was 3 years old when his father died at 46, leaving behind young Walter, his mother and an older sister, Henrietta Hoffman "Muffie" Lord, who was 19 when she died of scarlet fever in 1929.
After his father's death, which was accompanied by a sudden evaporation of a steady income, they left their former home and took up residence in a three-story brick house at 4314 Roland Ave., near the Roland Park water tower, where young Walter could lie in bed at night listening to the squealing streetcars as they made their way in and out of the nearby loop and then out onto Roland Avenue and University Parkway.
Enrolled at Gilman School from which he would graduate in 1935, Lord proved to be a bookish student. By the time he was 9, he had developed an interest in ships, particularly the Titanic, which sank in 1912.
Lord, who had been exiled to his Aunt Dorothea's library in her farm near Towson, made a startling discovery one hot, rainy summer afternoon.
There on the shelf was a thin, black volume. It was Lawrence Beesley's eyewitness account of the sinking of the Titanic. He had been a second-class passenger aboard the doomed liner.
"I was overwhelmed by this account - as indeed I am whenever I reread it today," he wrote.
In 1926, Lord, his mother and sister, sailed from New York to Southampton aboard the Olympic, the Titanic's sister ship, which became a living stage for the impressionable child. While at sea, he played the Titanic story over and over again in his mind.
When he was 10, Lord had written his first dramatic account of the Titanic disaster. When read before his Gilman classmates, it resulted in a rash of nightmares, or so complained nervous parents in calls to the school's headmaster.
Lord, who had kept his original account, showed it to Lawrence in 1988. After his death, she helped close down his apartment and inventory his papers.
"It is my regret that I never could find it," she lamented the other day.
Even though Lord spent his adult life in New York City, Baltimore, the Orioles and Gilman remained lifelong serious interests.
Since June 2002, Lord's ashes have rested in his family plot near his father, mother and sister in the Yew Section of Baltimore's Green Mount Cemetery.
