Folk Figure. Starting at the young age of 12, Walter weighed in at 200 pounds, he would break his leg and be bedridden from this break. Walter had always been a large child. At the young age of 15 he weighed in at 300, and Walter would never leave his house again, rarely leaving his bed. He would instead spend his time reading the bible, talking on the phone, listening to beloved gospel music, watching television and eating, a lot of eating. His three meals a day, not including his snacks would consist of a breakfast of 32 link sausages, a pound of bacon, a dozen eggs, a loaf of bread with grape jelly and a pot of coffee. His typical lunch would comprise of two large sandwiches, a pile of fried potatoes and a large bottle of soda. Dinner would be four and at times five ham steaks, a half-dozen potatoes, a half-dozen cobs of corn, a bottle of soda and an apple pie. His snacks would include a handful of candy bars. Walter paid for all this with his disability check he received from his broken leg as a child. His only exercise was to go 20 feet to his bathroom and it took him nearly an hour to get that far. It was on one of these excursions that he fell and got stuck in his bathroom door and had to be extricated by local fire, police and ambulance crews, who worked for four hours to set him free. When Walter got stuck in his bathroom door, it was at the time estimated that he weighed 1,400 pounds. This estimate is due to the fact the industrial scales used to weigh him broke at 1,000 pounds. Walter holds the Guinness World Record for the largest waist. It measured 302 centimeters (119 in) in 1987 when he was at his peak weight of 1,197 pounds. Comedian Dick Gregory used Walter to promote his "Bahamian" diet system, often stating that Walter had lost between 200 and 800 pounds. Walter would die of a heart attack at the age of 46. He weighed 1,125 pounds at the time, and removal of his body required rescue workers from the Hempstead Fire Department to cut a 4-by-6-foot hole in his bedroom wall. He was buried in a specially constructed, steel-reinforced coffin that was 54 inches wide, 40 inches deep, and 88 inches long. A forklift had to be used to lower his coffin into the ground.