The son of a Navy captain, Roger Wolcott Hall was born May 20, 1919, in Baltimore. He graduated from Annapolis High School in 1936 and a year later from the private Severn School before entering the University of Virginia.
He became captain of the lacrosse team and a member of the Punch and Julep dramatic society before graduating in 1941.
Hall joined the Army and finished the war at the rank of captain. After his discharge, he became a football press box announcer for the Baltimore Colts. The job ended because Colts' management did not appreciate his reaction to a referee's call against the team on what could have been a winning field goal.
"A Seeing Eye dog has been lost," Hall said over the public-address system. "Will the owner please return it to the officials' dressing room?"
Hall spent most of his life in New York as a freelance writer and editor. In the early 1970s he had a stint -- which he said was his favorite job -- as the cartoon editor for the old True magazine in New York.
He also was the host of radio shows, including "You Can't Fight Roger Hall," and wrote two novels, "All My Pretty Ones" (1959), a humorous book based on his relationship with a fashion model, and "19" (1970), a spy story.
He moved to Delaware in the 1980s with his wife, Linda Texter Hall, a poet and yoga instructor whom he married in 1973.
She is his only immediate survivor.
