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Eulogy: Magnanimous Self-promotion a la Walter Lord
by Harry Turner
Wherever Walter is, I’m sure he’s reviewed his obituaries and agreed with everything written about him. And, he undoubtedly put on the green visor he’d wear when he worked at night — that made him look more like an accountant doing books than a writer doing books, cut each obituary out of its respective newspaper, spent a few minutes locating a red felt-tip pen that still had its cap on it, then relabeled an old manila file folder: “OBITS”; and carefully filed his obituaries away, never to know that he’d also just filed away the cap to yet one more soon-useless red felt-tip pen.
The only thing in Walter’s obituaries that didn’t feel right to me was that common last line: “No Known Survivors.” First: it made it sound as if he went down with the ship. Second: rather than being just factual, “No Known Survivors” always evokes pity, and pity was the last thing Walter would have wanted readers to feel for him. And third: the irony is that Walter is survived by innumerable younger friends, many of whom had better and closer relationships with him than many sons and daughters ever have with their parents.
At my wedding, Walter made a toast that began: “I remember when Harry was three (3), climbing onto my lap and asking me to autograph a copy of A Night to Remember.” This memorable event in my childhood never occurred. I knew it; Walter knew it; but no one else at the reception knew it. As much as Walter was a master at retelling history, he was a past master at inventing it. But, in one short sentence, Walter accomplished three (3) objectives: he’d graciously flattered the bridegroom in front of his new in-laws; his warm imagery, no matter how imaginary, made the bridegroom feel special to him; and he’d cleverly advertized to the unenlightened in the room that he was the best-selling author of A Night to Remember.
The ease with which he could do so much with so few words fascinated me then and always would. I never found a term for this oratorical device he often employed, so I’ve always called it “magnanimous self-promotion à la Walter Lord.” God knows how many other boys and girls heard the same toast at their weddings. I heard it again, verbatim, at my second wedding.
So much of Walter was a great big wonderful kid, a kid who accumulated an extraordinary number of playmates during his life. The jury’s still out on the question of whether Walter possessed a special gift that enabled him to bring out the kids in his contemporaries; whether instead he just chose the simple and credulous among his contemporaries; or whether men who spend their lifetimes p-rading ‘round Princeton in silly costumes just make good playmates.
The jury’s unanimous on one point, however: Walter had a great love and need for real children. He loved taking kids with him on his flights of fancy. He loved that audience that would believe all the stories he’d make up — whose young imaginations were not yet hindered by any disbelief, the willing suspension of which would have taken time and could have thwarted the current adventure of the great moment.
A hot afternoon: two (2) kids and Walter Lord: walking slowly, back and forth, behind Morgan & Millard’s (A soda fountain/pharmacy at the Roland Park Shopping Center, a late 19th Century collection of retail shops designed and landscaped by the Olmstead Company (as was Roland Park itself)): eyes peeled to the ground, searching for something. This is the scene of the most important archaeological expedition of the last century — the hunt for evidence of that prehistoric creature, the Number 11 Streetcar. (Walter would ride the No. 11 back and forth to Gilman each day.) A small piece of track is discovered protruding slightly from a worn patch of asphalt: Eureka! Walter rushes over, confirms the find, raises his ever-present camera and directs that there must be a picture for the history books. We’re expertly posed: “Look really excited —like it’s the first time you’ve ever seen trolley track; point to it but look at me and don’t move!” Then hard-earned rewards: ice cream cones at Delvale’s and the walk home listening to Walter’s account of the most important thing in Baltimore’s history — the Lakeside Streetcar Line!
In 1962, Dad and I drove my older brother, Chooch, to Hyde Bay Camp by way of Manhattan to pick up Walter. It was during that drive between Manhattan and Cooperstown that I really fell “head over ears” for Walter. A Time to Stand had just been published and, to an eleven (11) year-old boy who’d only recently and most reluctantly ceded his coonskin cap, Walter’s dramatic, front seat retelling of the Battle of the Alamo, replete with sound effects and a curious impression of Santa Anna, was enthralling. That day I knew I’d found a hero who could replace Davy Crockett.
When the Turner boys visited Walter in 1964, I made it my mission to turn Walter Lord around to Barry Goldwater. Walter and I had quite the political row in his tiny 38th Street apartment. Neither of us gave an inch, but I readily agreed to a cease-fire when Walter asked me to weigh the importance of the presidency against getting on with our trip to Coney Island. Walter also then uttered a statement I thought “really cool” — that kindled some new thinking in my twelve (12) year-old mind: “I may not agree with what you say, Harry, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it!” It wasn’t until someone at college said, “Ah, Voltaire!” that I stopped attributing that quote to Walter.
Close to Election Day 1964, I received in the mail from Walter an envelope containing a rather worn campaign button that exclaimed: “I Want Roosevelt Again!” Thus, Walter initiated the first activity that would keep us connected and in contact for the rest of his life: the quadrennial hunt for and exchange of campaign buttons.
My third summer at Hyde Bay Camp began miserably. For no apparent reason, I went through an inconsolable two-week period of uncontrollable tears — writing daily letters home pleading to be picked up. I didn’t even notice that the weeping had stopped in week three (3) of camp — only that I was countermanding my prior pleas with letters begging to stay for the second half of camp. This sudden change in mood had nothing to do with Walter, but my happiness was certainly heightened by my receipt of a package containing fifty (50) little Tootsie Rolls and Walter’s note: “These always helped me!”
This was an extraordinary gift — it instantly got me into Hyde Bay’s “Fortune 500.” You see, nobody ate Tootsie Rolls at Hyde Bay Camp. Three (3) decades before Walter had established the miniature Tootsie Roll as the official currency of the camp. Everything that might be bought and sold between campers was done so with Tootsie Rolls. Everything had its price, and everything was worth its weight in Tootsie Rolls.
In 1966, I convinced my parents to let me leave Gilman at the end of Second Form year and go off to boarding school. I felt totally “out of it” — a class clown whose history of uncontrollable antics I felt would never allow me to fit into Gilman as anything but. (Archie Montgomery, headmaster of Gilman School from 1993 to 2001, my classmate who left Gilman at the same time and who later joined me again at Penn, took me aside a couple of years ago — acting as if he were some sort of a headmaster or something, and informed me in a quiet but seemingly serious voice: “Harry. . .Harry, do you realize that if you and I were back in Gilman Lower School today, we’d both be on Ritalin?”)
First semester of boarding school, for no apparent reason, I was miserable. Continuous crying. . .breaking into tears in English class. . .sobbing my way through Cicero. . .on the phone with a parent at least once or twice a day. Walter was there for me again: hilarious postcards, laconic letters, and a telegram on my birthday reading: “I’m behind you all the way — I even intend to vote for you twice! Happy Birthday! Your loyal constituent, Walter.”
By the time I became miserable in my sophomore year at college, again for no apparent reason, I was a regular at Walter’s digs at 116 East 68th Street. The place seemed an oasis where I could somehow manage to keep the severity of depression at bay. Walter was no psychologist; rather, he invented plenty of projects that kept me busy.
Walter remained incredibly supportive of me in early 1980s: first, when I broke up with a wife and second, when, on the spur of the moment, I left an excellent law firm and became a vagabond actor for a couple of years.
Our friendship truly deepened during a weekend in 1986 when I made a pilgrimage to New York to talk to the only friend with whom I felt comfortable discussing a diagnosis of manic-depressive illness.
The expert historian pulled out all the stops, interviewed me, questioned, probed, and helped me to start identifying and reordering the pieces of a disjointed past. Slowly, things in the past that I could never figure out would begin to make some sense— Hyde Bay tears, boarding school tears, Penn tears, good student one semester — class clown the next, quitting law because I was suddenly God’s gift to the theater.
Walter was fascinated by the whole “mental thing.” His sincere interest and matter-of-fact way of discussing it helped me not feel sorry for myself — to deal with the illness as if I were working on a tough jigsaw puzzle. And we developed our own mantra when he and I had our respective drink and beer: “Take your medicine and. . .Damn the Torpedoes!”
Walter took great interest in all high school and college kids, not just the sons and daughters of his friends and not just ‘cause he liked kids, but also because of his desires to keep learning, keep up, stay current, remain relevant. “But how does Harry feel about ‘the Draft?’” Or: “. . .about Viet Nam?” And it never ceased to amaze me how Walter could disagree so much with opinions held by my father and at the same time hold my father so dear and so valued a friend. At times, it seemed to me that Walter was doing much more than required by Voltaire.
The confidence into which I’d taken Walter had an unexpected consequence: he reciprocated. Among other things, we started talking about Parkinson’s Disease and how he dealt or didn’t deal with it; about women, about his mother and sister; things about my father I never knew; such as Walter’s double-date with Dad to the 1939 World’s Fair and the awkward moment for everyone else when my father insisted that his date pay her own way.
In the ‘90s, as Walter became increasingly fragile, I’d receive calls from him asking if I could be his U.L. for this or that weekend or event. “U.L.” is the Hyde Bay acronym for “Unskilled Laborer” or “Useless Loafer” — the uncompensated minion in the no-man’s-land between camper and counselor who did all the camp’s grunt work like . . . pouring fresh lime down the holes in the outhouses. I’d be his roommate on such weekends: pushing him around in his wheelchair, ensuring his tumbler always had enough Old Grand Dad in it, helping him to bed — Laurel and Hardy couldn’t’ve created a more ridiculous scene than that of a tipsy Harry Turner attempting to help a tipsy Walter Lord to bed. There’d be cries from Walter. . .like: “Oops! I think I’ve found the floor.”; and from me: “Man overboard!”
From 1999 ‘til last summer, I tried to spend a day a month with Walter: I’d push him up Lexington Avenue to a French bakery for some of his beloved Madelaines, over to Central Park to watch the sail boats and have a hot dog for lunch, or sit on his bed and continue the never-ending project of deciphering the writing of Major Hoffman, an ancestor who, during Grant’s Virginia campaigns, kept in a pocket notebook the names, amounts, and terms of loans he’d made to soldiers.
In the late afternoons, comfortably sitting in a chair with his bourbon in hand, Walter’s mind would start wandering back to his boyhood Baltimore, and I’d willingly wander with him. We’d be at Gilman or his home on Roland Avenue. Once he took me to his first grade classroom at Roland Park Country School. He’d sing the school song — something about picnic baskets and wine.
These sun-setting trips back to the Roland Park of his childhood were fascinating for their detail and for the warmth Walter obviously felt. On my last late afternoon, I felt. . . I realized that Walter had started his journey back home.
In 1984, Walter was awarded the Andrew White Medal at Loyola College (Andrew White was Maryland’s first published author) and had been asked to speak there as part of Loyola’s celebration of 350 years of religious toleration in Maryland.
There’s a lot of essential Walter in the speech he gave. His love of irony: although Loyola may have been celebrating 350 years of religious toleration in Maryland, Walter was quick to point out that Maryland’s 1776 Declaration of Rights granted equal protection to only all persons professing the Christian religion, which created [quote] “the odd paradox that a Jew in Maryland could hold a federal job but not a job with the ‘Free State[.]”
Then there was a bit of his “magnanimous self-promotion.” He lamented Maryland’s failure to recognize its heroes properly: Baltimore’s savior from the British in 1814, Sam Smith (subtext — read Dawn’s Early Light); Wade McCluskey, whose discovery of the Japanese Fleet at Midway enabled the United States to turn the tide of the Pacific War (subtext — you might want to go out and buy Incredible Victory).
Walter then, of course, sang the praises of a hitherto unsung hero he’d rescued from the dustbin of Maryland history: Thomas Kennedy, a Roman Catholic state legislator from Washington County who, at every opportunity from 1818 to 1826, introduced, fought for, and finally succeeded in passing a state constitutional amendment granting equal rights to Maryland Jews.
And finally one heard from Walter himself, the large and physically awkward man who so respected of the individual, whether sixty (60) or six (6) years-old, an unassuming modern Voltaire who could preach with such understated simplicity:
True toleration cannot come from the statute books, but from the heart and spirit of people themselves. . . . Toleration can never be serenely contemplated as a job well done. It is not one of those things that are learned and never forgotten, like swimming or riding a bicycle. It is more like playing the piano: it requires constant practice to do it well.