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. 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. He will be remembered for his generosity, his stories, his cocktails, his collections of books and family heirlooms, and above all his kindness.