His career in literature began serendipitously.
Walter Thompson advertising agency, writing ads for Aqua Velva after-shave, Ford trucks and Ballantine beer. Rather than practice law, though, Lord became a copywriter for the J. World War II then intervened, and Lord left Yale to join the Office of Strategic Services, where he assembled intelligence reports.Īt war's end, he returned to Yale, earned his law degree and moved to New York. After graduating in 1939, he went to Yale Law School, where, he confesses, he spent "more time in the Shubert Theater" than in class. (Despite such complaints, he is is still an active trustee of the school, which recently honored him by naming its middle school library after him.)Īt Princeton University, Lord majored in American and Modern European History. For his senior speech in 1935, his evocative and dramatic treatment of the ship's sinking was so vivid that several parents called the school's headmaster to complain that young Lord's talk had given their children nightmares. He drew pictures of the ship on the 20th anniversary of the sinking. "From 1913 to 1932, when memoirs of retiring North Atlantic sea captains began to appear, the Titanic was never mentioned and seldom discussed," he says.Īs a student at the Gilman School, Lord's interest in the Titanic expressed itself in various ways. Also, the ship sailed from Pier 59, where the Titanic would have docked," Lord recalls.ĭespite the enormity of the 1912 Titanic disaster, Lord says the eruption of World War I overshadowed interest in the ship during the 1920s, and the story was soon all but forgotten.
"She was enormous and still one of the great crack North Atlantic liners. In 1926, a year before he would find the Titanic memoir at his aunt's farm, Lord had traveled with his family aboard the Olympic, the Titanic's sister ship.
8, 1917, to John Walter Lord Sr., a Baltimore lawyer who would die when Lord was just 3, and Henrietta Mactier Hoffman, daughter of an old and distinguished Maryland family. This room on Manhattan's Upper East Side has a decidedly Baltimore feel to it, a gentility perhaps reminiscent of Lord's family homes in Guilford and Roland Park.
With the sun streaming through the windows of his spacious East 68th Street apartment on an unusually warm spring morning, he has just finished a late breakfast of coffee and a roll at the desk in his cozy, book-lined study.