CHATHAM, Mass. — As he looked around Veterans Field on a hot morning in the middle of June, one last time before leaving for his next adventure, Bill Walker beamed with pride. After a few decades residing on Cape Cod, he and his wife of 64 years, Janet, were packed up and ready to move to Virginia.

Walker is a much different man now than he was when he last left the Cape for the Old Dominion State. It was 1958, and Walker had just finished his second season playing outfield for the Chatham town team in the Cape Cod Baseball League. Then, he was wide-eyed and eager to pursue a law degree from the University of Virginia. But life has since flown by for the 87-year-old Walker, whose newest concern was the fallout of Israel’s June 13 airstrikes in Iran.

He operates an international construction business by himself, focusing on property development in the Middle East. Some of his plans were on hold following the bombings, he said. He’d been on calls all morning to discuss how he was going to pivot.

“You adjust, you react,” Walker said nonchalantly. “I like to keep my hand in things.”

At an age where most are sipping lemonade, Walker is limitless. That’s why if you ask him and Janet, this is the perfect time in their lives to move. They’ve maximized their stay on the Cape. Now, they can’t wait to find new golf courses, make new friends, drink wine and keep up with their daily workout routines in Virginia — the amenities that Walker says make life worth living.

That doesn’t mean leaving Cape Cod is any easier for him.

For Walker, the Cape is where his origins lie.

He’s a descendant of William Nickerson, who founded Chatham in 1665. His favorite days as a child were spent at his grandmother’s house in Harwich Port. He became a legend with his 1957 season in the Cape League, where he won the batting title playing for Chatham’s town team. And the Cape is where he returned once he concluded his journey in politics, a career where he served as a high-ranking member of the Nixon and Ford administrations.

There are few people with blood ties to Cape Cod who have accomplished as much as Walker has throughout his athletic, political and entrepreneurial endeavors. As he moves onto the next chapter of his life in Virginia, the Cape has bestowed him a parting gift: a selection into the 2025 CCBL Hall of Fame induction class. On Nov. 16, Walker will become Chatham’s 33rd Hall of Famer in team history, forever etching his name into Cape League lore.

“I take pride in what I’ve done,” Walker said. “Certainly the Cape has been a very, very important part of it.”

Walker isn’t one to look for praise. When he received a call from CCBL Hall of Fame Committee Co-Chair John Garner a few days before his selection was announced, he asked if Garner was pulling his leg. Walker’s humble doubt turned into pure joy once he realized Garner was serious.

Garner said Walker has a resume unlike any other Cape League Hall of Famer. He emphasized that baseball was the main factor in his selection, but it was also the reason why it took so long for Walker to get in. There aren’t many registered stats from the 50s. Garner and his fellow committee members simply didn’t have much evidence to verify Walker’s merit. All they needed, however, was a mere glance at Walker’s batting average from the 1957 season.

“It makes it harder for the committee to get him past the finish line,” Garner said of Walker’s Hall of Fame case. “Other than the fact that hitting .432 just really stands out.”

Walker didn’t go on to play in Major League Baseball. The Wesleyan College graduate was signed by the Baltimore Orioles and fizzled out of the pros after the club tried to change his batting stance, which Walker said went awry.

Little did he know the end of his baseball career would propel him toward the Oval Office’s circle of trust.

Walker was fascinated by the turbulence that defined the 1960s. In the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and as the Vietnam War raged on, Walker and his wife were living in Evanston, Illinois, where he worked as a lawyer and was active in the town’s Young Republicans Club. “There was great upheaval,” Walker said of the political state back then. He felt compelled to seize the moment.

“Frankly, politics seemed a lot more interesting than practicing law,” Walker said with a laugh.

His road to Washington, D.C., began in 1968, when he was asked by the Evanston Young Republicans Club to run the reelection campaign for Donald Rumsfeld, a former congressman in the state of Illinois’ 13th District. Walker obliged. Rumsfeld won by a landslide; his fourth election victory in a row. Walker and Rumsfeld became close friends, as did Janet and Joyce Pierson, Rumsfeld’s spouse.

A year later, after Richard Nixon took office as the 37th President of the United States, Nixon asked Rumsfeld to serve as his new director of the United States Office of Economic Opportunity. Rumsfeld, despite holding previous political disagreements about the implementation of the office itself, accepted the offer and asked a friend to join his staff.

“It was very controversial, but Don asked me to come down and work for him, which I did,” Walker said. “Then I spent eight years there.”

Walker became an integral part of Nixon’s White House as an advisor, then went on to serve as an ambassador and chief trade negotiator for the United States in Tokyo under Gerald Ford’s administration.

While Nixon was in office, he said he often worked for Rumsfeld, but also answered to Dick Cheney more times than not. Cheney, then a part of Rumsfeld’s OEO staff long before becoming George W. Bush’s Vice President from 2000-08, developed a tight bond with Walker over their years together in Washington. Walker said the two of them worked “endless hours together” and developed a mutual respect that extended beyond serving in government.

Walker and Cheney’s kids are around the same age. So in the limited free time Walker and Cheney had, the two families would gather for outdoor picnics and take skiing trips together. The children would play, the wives would catch up and the men would have some “adult time,” Janet said. The adults have lost touch since then, but the kids are still friends, Janet said. Walker has also kept a close eye on the political career of Cheney’s daughter, Liz, whom he says he’s “very approving” of.

“We would always include the Cheneys, because they’re fun and interesting to be with,” Janet said.

His personal interactions shaped his career in politics. He went from not getting to speak much to Nixon — who he called a “withdrawn” man — to gaining opportunities as an entrusted figure of Ford’s White House, where he had 2-3 meetings per week with the former president in the Oval Office.

Of course, Walker is still quick to praise Ford’s athletic history; the 38th president formerly played football at the University of Michigan. But seeing Ford behind the curtains gave Walker a new perspective on him, one he didn’t have the chance to gain with Nixon. He saw Ford as a human, and felt Ford led as one, too, which Walker believes to be a rare quality in the modern age.

After Nixon’s resignation due to the Watergate scandal — Walker remembers picking up the next day’s newspaper with “fire tongs,” he told the Cape Cod Times in 2018 — Ford assumed the role of the presidency. Walker originally wanted to move on from government, Janet said, though he was offered by Rumsfeld, the then-Secretary of Defense under Ford, a job as the director of the presidential personnel office. It was an offer Walker couldn’t refuse.


Walker admired the grace in which Ford carried himself after Watergate, saying his goal was to restore the trust between the American people and their government. Ford told Walker he needed others who shared these same values, and he wanted Walker to be the person who recruited them. The way Ford handled his promotion is the way Walker was inspired to lead others in the future.

“When I was the director of the presidential personnel office, we would have discussions, and when he’d make a selection, there were times I would say, ‘But Mr. President, I really, really think that’s a mistake. Here’s what we should do instead,’” Walker said, imitating a typical conversation between him and Ford. “You could let him know what your reasoning was. I can’t imagine anybody having a conversation like that with (Lyndon B.) Johnson, for example, or even Kennedy. Certainly not (Donald) Trump.”

Walker couldn’t recall any major decisions he swayed Ford on, but he remembers one the president convinced him to take up. After Ford decided he’d run for reelection, he needed someone to help facilitate trade agreements between the U.S. and Japan, as part of negotiations surrounding the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT. He chose Walker.

Walker recalls Ford saying he wanted someone he could trust, and that it’d be his honor to nominate Walker to the role. Walker promptly accepted. He and his family moved around the world because of his job, until Ford’s reelection bid failed three years later.

Through the excruciating hours, Walker escaped the beast of Washington better than when he’d entered. He no longer misses getting late-night calls about Saudi Arabia unexpectedly raising their prices on gasoline, a common impromptu instance of peril that Walker experienced, but he misses working with his team each day to accomplish a central goal; the same solace Walker found in baseball, he found in government.

“I grew to trust my judgment,” Walker said. “To interact with people, you have to have a skill — to make sure you listen to them and they listen to you and that you follow up at the end of a conversation. You have to seek consensus.”

Sixty-five years ago, Walker used the leftover bonus money he received in a rookie contract from the Baltimore Orioles to buy Janet a wedding ring. A year later, they got hitched. Janet has worn the ring ever since.

“She’s been my trophy wife for all these years,” Walker said.

And to think it all started on a blind date.

Janet said she met Walker by chance one night while she was a junior at Smith College. With her university being an all-girls school and Walker’s Wesleyan College being all guys, their only chance to ever mingle was at local bars in Massachusetts. One night, Janet said, her friends from Smith College begged her to go out, though she was originally reluctant with the fear she’d miss out on valuable studying time. Her friends said to heck with it, and Janet begrudgingly went out to a bar with them. Hours later, she met her future husband of more than 60 years.

“We went out and we had a great time, and we carried on from there,” Janet said.

Perhaps Walker did in fact learn good judgement before his time in the government. A few weeks ago, Walker and Janet celebrated their 64th wedding anniversary.

Yet the two are unlike your typical couple pushing the ages of 90; they live with a spirit that’s eternally youthful. They attack every day with great curiosity and immense ferocity, both in the way they constantly strive to stimulate their minds and maintain peak physical health by holding each other accountable during shared workout sessions.

A rare perfect match.

“We have fun together,” Walker said. “We cook together, we eat well together, we drink a lot of wine together, we work out every day. It’s a pretty good life.”

Walker introduced Janet to the Cape in 1960 when he took her clamming, along with plenty of trips to the beach. Janet fell in love with the area and all it had to offer. Before their move to Virginia, their Cape Cod lifestyle was filled with just as many beach days — they’d read books together while sipping glasses of wine, listening to the waves crash in the background — and trips to their favorite waterside restaurants, such as the Tugboat and Swan River.

Along with playing golf together and making a number of country club pals, the Walkers made the Cape their safe haven following a long life of travel.

“What’s been wonderful about the Cape is it’s really laid back and relaxed,” Janet said. “It’s not a frantic place.”

She’s been through plenty of franticness already: Walker is constantly moving.

After graduating from the University of Virginia, where he started the school’s rugby club and earned a degree from UVA’s School of Law, the two lived in Evanston, a town north of Chicago, for six and a half years. That’s where Walker first got roped into the political sphere.

Janet was never fazed by Walker entering the belly of the beast in Washington, though. She was more fascinated by his work than anything.

“I found the whole process really interesting,” Janet said of Walker’s introduction into politics. “But this is a longtime interest of his, particularly the whole international geopolitical view of the world.”

She remembers scary moments, like when she figured Nixon would have to resign in the wake of Watergate — though relieved her husband’s department had no involvement in the scandal — and timeless moments, such as the insightful conversations she’d learn about Walker having with Ford. Janet complemented Ford’s thoughtfulness and sense of humor, qualities she felt her husband shares with him.

And why wouldn’t she have anything but fond memories of Walker’s era in governmental service? After all, it’s clear no too big of an occupation would ever strain the two’s relationship. As long as they have time to talk over their days while conditioning themselves so they can keep creating memories, Walker’s relationship with Janet is unbreakable. She is his escape from the bustling lifestyle he’s kept intact for over 60 years. And she takes great pride that Walker emphasizes time with her through all his endeavors.

“He really cares about the world,” Janet said of Walker. “Not that he’s able to necessarily change the world, but what he does is very intellectually stimulating, which is the most important thing.”

Walker’s grandmother died in 1951. Years later, his family lost her house in Harwich Port, an event that spawned a rift between Walker’s relatives. It wasn’t necessarily the time for him to clamor to his family for help playing baseball.

Without his old high-school classmate, Dana Johnson, who knows if Walker would have ever stepped on the old grounds of Veterans Field?

Johnson’s parents had a home on the Cape, who helped set him and Walker up to play on Chatham’s town team in the Lower Cape Cod League — a league, and era, that predates the CCBL. The 6-foot-4 Walker had shown great promise as a freshman at Wesleyan University, with only team rules preventing him from making a year-one jump to the varsity squad.

“We arranged in the summer of ‘56 to play (for Chatham) in the summer of ‘57,” Walker said. “So we did. I came down and, in my first game in Orleans, I hit two home runs, a double, and just went on from there.”

The season itself could’ve never been replicated, at least not in Walker’s eyes. He was unstoppable in 1957 playing for the Chatham town team, posting a Ted Williams-esque .432 batting average en route to winning the league’s batting title. His favorite moments from the year include when he stole home to win a game in the ninth at Veterans Field, and another contest when he drove in all of Chatham’s runs and won the Ballantine’s Beer Player of the Week trophy, which he still has in possession to this day.

The award gives him amusement. Though his success in that ‘57 campaign amused him even more. He didn’t think a year like that was possible. Now, he relishes in the fact that he was the bane of the entire Cape League’s existence for one glorious summer.

“They just couldn’t get me out.”

There are, unfortunately, not many witnesses to the acts of high-average hitting that Walker committed against the Cape. Most of Walker’s teammates are dead. Some have lived to tell the tale, like John Whelan, an author, Chatham resident and former town team teammate of Walker.

“Bill played with us in 1958 — he was our best hitter,” Whelan said. “He was a good first baseman, good outfielder, had a sweet swing, and was just a terrific player.”

Those were the glory years of Walker’s baseball career. He made the most of his Orioles’ contract (marked by Janet’s ring) but he never made the Major Leagues. That doesn’t change the fact he was one of Cape Cod’s most potent collegiate league hitters of all time, though.

Walker credits most of what he accomplished that season to his former head coach at Newton High School, Howard Ferguson, who harped fundamentals and fitness into his brain from an early age. He also went through a massive growth spurt that caused him to tower over others as a 6-foot-4 kid throughout high school. But, if you ask Walker, he could never quite capture what the difference was for him that led to his mythical season in Chatham.

“I wish I knew,” Walker said of the rhythm he developed in the 1957 Cape Cod League season. “I could never recover it again.”

The Nickersons are Chatham’s First Family. And Walker won’t let you forget it.

Days following his CCBL Hall of Fame selection, Walker sat in the stands of Veterans Field and reflected on his family history on Cape Cod and his place in it. Mention the Nickerson lineage, and he’ll light up like a lamp before gleefully boasting about his family’s origins.

He’ll tell you about William Nickerson, the first European settler of the region, and how he bought the land Chatham stands on from the Massasoit Native American tribe.

He’ll tell you about William’s nine children and how most of them settled in Chatham, fostering a long-standing community filled with generations upon generations of Nickersons.

He’ll bring up a map he owns circa 1857, one of North Chatham that lists all of the town’s individual homes and homeowners, and points out that in the early days of the town, “it was all Nickersons.”

And then he’ll tell you about the new advancements to the Nickerson Family Association, a genealogy center in Chatham that Walker says has evolved into more of a “Nickerson legacy center.”

The Nickerson family connection with Cape Cod is something Walker will struggle to be away from, due to his immense pride, though it will always remain with him in his soul. As he leaves the Cape and settles in Virginia alongside his loyal companion Janet, taking his next step in a journey that continues to defy Father Time, he can be satisfied knowing there’s no one who’s added more rich history to the Nickerson legacy than him.