Walter Smith Marder

Walter Smith Marder was born on May 26, 1938, in Morristown, NJ, to John and May Marder. He attended Bernards High School, followed by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he graduated in 1961 with a major in architecture. After college he joined the U.S. Navy and sailed the Atlantic on the U.S.S. Miller as a lieutenant. Back on land, he set off for San Francisco, where he worked as an architect, contributing both to the design of the iconic Transamerica Building and to a movement to unionize architects in the city. Through a mutual friend, he met Linna Ward, who spent the rest of her life by his side. They were married on September 30, 1972 at St. Mary the Virgin Episcopal Church in San Francisco. They later spent two years in the Peace Corps in Belmopan, Belize, where Walter designed municipal buildings for the new capital city. In 1976, the couple moved to Delaware, where Walter worked as an architect for the City of Wilmington. They welcomed their son, Andrew, there in 1980 and made one final move to Tallahassee, Florida, where their daughter, Monica, was born in 1986 and where Walter worked as a historic preservation architect for the State of Florida until his retirement. Along the way, he earned a master’s degree in history from FSU in 2009.

History imbued every aspect of Walter’s life, and he was alive to the stories contained in objects both magnificent and mundane. Family antiques, roadside furniture lovingly restored, fine crystal, and faded World’s Greatest Dad mugs. He loved rescuing and preserving things and their stories. Family road trips were punctuated by pullovers to photograph a building with an interesting roofline or a brick exterior in a slightly different shade of red. He didn’t want to lose a single detail. He collected, cataloged, and curated his life. Every room in his house was filled with books: architecture volumes, Margaret Armstrong illustrated covers, catalogs from the Marder, Luse, & Co. type foundry.

Walter was a generous host under any circumstances, offering guests on arrival a gin and tonic or an old fashioned, depending on the season. Dinner always came with wine and candles. He waited for the ladies to sit before he would take his chair. Elbows off the table, napkins in laps – and then the stories could begin. Walter’s stories were accompanied by genealogies, timelines, and maps. He shared family anecdotes from decades past, repeating them often enough that they would stick in the minds of his children and their children. He reminisced about summers at the family lake house, the time he ran a boat into a pier, and his high school graduation gift of a new suit and a ticket to Detroit to attend a fancy party and an Ella Fitzgerald concert.

Walter passed away peacefully, surrounded by his family, on April 16, 2023. He leaves behind a lifetime of love and his surviving family members: son Andrew, daughter-in-law Alexandria, and grandson Maxwell of Hyattsville, Maryland; daughter Monica, son-in-law Graham, and granddaughter Alice Sutton of Hoboken, New Jersey; and several nieces and nephews. There will be a memorial service at the Episcopal Church of the Advent on Piedmont Road at 10:30 am on Friday, May 19. The family asks for donations to a charity of one’s choice in lieu of flowers.

Fond memories and expressions of sympathy may be shared at www.CulleysMeadowWoodFuneral.com for the Marder family.