Walter M. McCardell Jr., Baltimore Sun photographer whose career spanned more than 4 decades, dies
Walter M. McCardell Jr., a veteran Baltimore Sun photographer whose career spanned more than four decades, died of kidney cancer June 15 at a daughter’s Stoneleigh home.
Mr. McCardell, who is thought to be the oldest living Sun alumni and the last person to have worked in the newspaper’s old Sun Square building at Charles and Baltimore streets, was 98.
“Walter was always very poised whenever he was on an assignment and his photographs showed his training as a news photographer,” said Jed Kirschbaum, who spent 33 years as a Sun photographer before retiring in 2011.
“I loved Walter, who was always there to be helpful, and he had a way of making you feel comfortable, which came in handy on assignments,” he said. “He always said, ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff.”’
Robert K. “Bob” Hamilton was photo director for the Sun until retiring in 2015.
“Walter was a really talented and thorough photographer who had been through and seen a lot,” Mr. Hamilton said. “He was always willing to answer questions and I remember as a young photographer being out in a press car and Walter telling me this history of the city.”
Walter Miller McCardell Jr., son of Walter M. McCardell Sr., a Sears Roebuck & Co. department manager, and Amelia Myers, was born at home on McCabe Avenue in Govans, where he was raised.
He attended Loyola High School and the old Towson Catholic High School before dropping out, but later earned his GED, and studied for three years at what is now Loyola University Maryland.
In 1943, Mr. McCardell was working part-time delivering flowers for Isaac Moss Florist on Charles Street, when he met his future wife, Sarah Virginia Wilson, who also worked there. The two fell in love and married in 1950.
Mr. McCardell, who had never owned a camera or been in a darkroom, applied for a photographer’s job at The Sun in 1944, as a $25 a week photo apprentice in the newspaper’s commercial art department.
“I thought I’d like that kind of work that keeps you outside, and the freedom of it all,” he explained in a 2014 Sun interview. “It kind of worked out for me.”
He honed his trade from such veteran news photographers as Leroy Merriken and Frank Miller, working assignments covering race tracks, the 1944 Army-Navy football game and fox hunts.
In June 1945, he began working as a $35 a week photographer in the Washington bureau of the Associated Press, where he covered President Harry S. Truman, Capitol Hill and the old Washington Senators baseball team.
At 1 p.m. on Aug. 14, 1945, when President Truman announced the Japanese surrender, Mr. McCardell was at Walter Reed Hospital photographing veterans, while another White House AP photographer took a photo of the president.
Mr. McCardell was given a copy of the photo, and in 1958, when President Truman was attending a political fundraiser in Baltimore, he asked the president to autograph it. He wrote: “To Walter McCardell. Kindest regards and happy memories of Aug. 14, 1945. Harry S. Truman.”
Mr. McCardell kept the photo on his desk for the rest of his life.
Drafted in September 1945, he spent 13 months in the Army as a military policeman and as a staff photographer for the then Camp Lee base newspaper, until being discharged in 1946, when he returned to The Sun as a staff photographer.
During his career, he photographed every president from Truman to George H.W. Bush, regional and national news events such as President John F. Kennedy’s funeral, the March on Washington in 1963, the 1968 riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., not to mention hundreds of Orioles, Colts, Bullets and Clippers games.
When he learned the 1968 riots were breaking out in the city, he rushed to Harford Avenue and Aisquith Street, when he was met by an African-American man.
“The young man said, ‘Mister, these people are really mad. You shouldn’t be in this neighborhood,'” Mr. McCardell recalled in a 50th anniversary Sun piece on the riots.
“I took his advice and left. Later in life, I thought, ‘This fellow might have been an angel. He probably saved me from some serious trouble.'”
In 1964, when covering President Lyndon B. Johnson’s arrival by helicopter in Patterson Park, he was six feet away from the president when a bystander hurled an egg that hit Mr. McCardell’s glasses and exploded, but he still was able to get his picture.
One day on assignment in South Baltimore, Mr. McCardell and Mr. Kirschbaum ducked into a bar, and when they came out, couldn’t find their press car.
“It was loaded with all of our equipment and we were trying to figure out how we were going to explain to our bosses how the car became lost,” Mr. Kirschbaum said with a laugh. “Finally, we realized we had parked it on another street and it was there.”
In 1950, when the newspaper left Sun Square for its new home at 501 N. Calvert St., Mr. McCardell was one of the mischievous photographers who filled a cigar box with cockroaches from the old building which they gleefully released into the new one.
“When I joined the paper, those old photo guys considered me a juvenile delinquent. They were right out of ‘The Front Page’ with fedoras and cards that said ‘Press,’ tucked into the headband,” Mr. Kirschbaum said.
“Walter was kind and funny and filled with great stories from the old days,” said Barbara Haddock Taylor, a 40-year Sun photographer.
“Those guys in photo taught me what it meant to be a news photographer and they were always willing to answer questions,” Mr. Hamilton said. “And I loved hearing about their poker games in photo and drinking in the darkroom.”
“He took me under his wings when I started there,” said Algerina Perna, who retired in 2018, after a 31-year career as a photographer.
“He always called me ‘Little Girl,’ which I wouldn’t have liked if it were anyone else than Walter, because he was so paternal, a father of 10 children, and my good friend,” Ms. Perna said.
Thousands of pictures later and numerous awards including having one of his photos published in Life magazine, Mr. McCardell retired in 1990.
In 1969, Mr. McCardell and his wife moved their family into a large home on Bellona Avenue in Govans.
“He was a great father but was very strict — he had eight daughters — when we were growing up but he was always very respectful,” said a daughter, Margaret Ellen Clemmens, with whom Mr. McCardell had lived with for the last 13 years. “He was my confidante. He was my everything. He was a very kind person and that is a wonderful word to describe him.”
Mr. McCardell’s Roman Catholic faith was important to him.
“We later reconnected at St. Mary’s of the Assumption in Govans, and he inspired me to be more committed to my own faith,” she said.
“When he couldn’t attend Mass due to health, I brought communion to his home, and we’d say the rosary together,” Ms. Perna said. “Family and faith were uppermost in his life.”
“One of his favorite lines was, ‘Keep the faith,'” Ms. Clemmens said.
“I always called him ‘Father McCardell,'” Mr. Kirschbaum said, “and one of his last messages to me was, ‘Say your prayers.'”
“I wouldn’t mind doing it all over again,” he said while reflecting on his life in the 2014 interview. “It was a nice job if you didn’t care about the money.”
He enjoyed spending summers at a family home at Bembe Beach near Annapolis.
His wife of 63 years died in 2013.
A Mass of Christian burial will be offered at 11 a.m. July 8 at St. Mary of the Assumption on York Road and Bellona Avenue.
In addition to his daughter, he is survived by a son, Paul M. McCardell, Baltimore Sun researcher, of Columbia; six other daughters, Susan Elizabeth McCardell, Virginia Laurie Spurrier, and Kathleen Amelia McCardell, all of Baltimore, Patricia Agnes Moore, of Delta, Pennsylvania, and Mary Angela Creshker of Austin, Texas; 21 grandchildren; and 23 great-grandchildren. Another son, Walter M. McCardell III, died in 2018; and a daughter, Sarah “Sally” McCardell Polen, died in 1986.