Background
Walter was born on December 26, 1884 in Ansonville, North Carolina, United States, the son of the Rev. Lucius Edney Stacy, a Methodist circuit rider, and Rosa Johnson Stacy.
Walter was born on December 26, 1884 in Ansonville, North Carolina, United States, the son of the Rev. Lucius Edney Stacy, a Methodist circuit rider, and Rosa Johnson Stacy.
After preparatory education at Weaverville College (1895 - 1898) and Morven High School (1899 - 1902), Stacy attended the University of North Carolina, where he became a champion debater.
He received the A. B. (1908) and studied law (1908 - 1909).
Stacy began to practice law at Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1910 and was elected to represent New Hanover County in the North Carolina legislature in 1915. A year later he was appointed to the Superior Court of the Eighth Judicial District. He served until 1920, when he became the youngest person ever elected an associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court.
In March 1925 Stacy was named chief justice to fill a vacancy, and the next year was elected to the post for a full eight-year term. He was reelected in 1934, 1942, and 1950. His twenty-six-year tenure as chief justice was the longest in the annals of the court.
During his years as chief justice, Stacy frequently served as an arbitrator in labor disputes, often at the request of the president of the United States. In 1927 and 1928 the United States Board of Mediation selected him for the Board of Arbitration; he eventually chaired the panel in a controversy over wages between the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and certain southeastern railroads.
In 1928 President Calvin Coolidge appointed Stacy to a five-member board that was to deal with a problem involving the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, other railway unions, and several western railroads. Three years later he arbitrated disputes between the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen and certain New York lines and between the Brotherhood of Railroad and Steamship Clerks and the Railway Express Agency for the United States Board of Mediation.
In June 1932 President Herbert Hoover made Stacy chairman of a fact-finding panel dealing with some southern railroads and their employees and of the three-man National Steel Labor Board, appointed to head off a strike.
During summers Stacy lectured at the law schools of the University of North Carolina (1922 - 1925) and Northwestern University (1926 - 1927), and was offered the deanship of the former. In 1932 he headed a commission that rewrote and modernized the North Carolina constitution, the first major revision proposed since Reconstruction. He occasionally was mentioned for other political positions, notably in 1929 when party regulars sought a candidate to run for the United States Senate against Furnifold Simmons, a maverick incumbent. Stacy's name was also put forward from time to time when a vacancy occurred on the United States Supreme Court. Although often in the public eye, Stacy was extremely shy; he shunned an active social life and "had few diversions and no hobbies".
He died on September 13, 1951 at Raleigh.
He was a life-long Democrat.
Quotations: "The rule is well established in this jurisdiction, " he once wrote, "that the voice of the people is the voice of finality. "
A kind, courtly, unassuming individual, Stacy had a mild, pleasing temperament and a warm and subtle sense of humor.
He "loved books" and "lived with them and in them".
On June 15, 1929, he married Maude DeGan Graft of Lake Placid, New York; she died in 1933, and the marriage produced no children.