Guy T. O. Hollyday, an early proponent of urban renewal and housing reform and former commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration, died Friday of pneumonia at Mercy Medical Center. He was 98.
The Sparks resident became president of the Title Guarantee and Trust Co. in 1944 and was named chairman of the board in 1954. He became vice chairman in a 1960 merger with the Maryland Title Guarantee Co., a post from which he retired nearly 30 years ago.
He was FHA commissioner during the Eisenhower administration, from the spring of 1953 to the spring of 1954.
In the early 1950s Mr. Hollyday chaired a zoning advisory committee in Baltimore.
In the early 1960s he headed a committee that prepared a suggested revision and consolidation of the city's housing code.
He also organized and was president of Fight Blight Inc., which made loans to homeowners to enable them to fix up their properties. He was vice president of the American Council to Improve Our Neighborhoods (ACTION).
Mr. Hollyday was an active member of study groups of the Build America Better Committee of the National Association of Real Estate Boards. He had been chairman of the association's homebuilders and subdividers division.
Before heading Title Guarantee and Trust, he was vice president of, and Baltimore representative for, Randall H. Hagner Co., a Washington-based mortgage banking firm. He was president of the Fiscal Mortgage Co. and vice president of Key Realty Co.
He had also been associated with the Roland Park Co. and had worked for the Industrial Bureau of the Board of Trade of Baltimore.
He had been on the boards of the Savings Bank of Baltimore, Loyola Federal Savings and Loan Association, the Hagner Co., the Guilford Realty Co. and James W. Rouse & Co.
The Rouse firm named its board room at Cross Keys for him and, after his service in Washington, friends raised money to buy a building in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood of Washington, which they rehabilitated and turned into a community center they named for him.
In the 1930s Mr. Hollyday was president of the Real Estate Board of Baltimore. In the 1940s he was president of the Mortgage Bankers Association of America and chairman of the national title underwriters section of the American Title Association.
The Baltimore native was a 1910 graduate of the Boys' Latin School and a 1914 graduate of the Johns Hopkins University, where he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi fraternity and played on the lacrosse team that won the collegiate championship in 1913.
He later was chairman of the board of Boys' Latin and presidenof the Hopkins alumni association.
Before World War I he was assistant secretary of the Maryland League for National Defense and a member of Battery A of the Maryland National Guard field artillery. He served as an officer in a cavalry unit during the war.
He had been a member of the vestry of Baltimore's Christ Episcopal Church, the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer and St. John's Episcopal Church, Western Run Parish.
He had been board chairman of the Maryland-Delaware Council of Churches and Christian Education.
A subscriber of the Bachelors Cotillon and a member of the Johns Hopkins and Elkridge clubs, he was an honorary life member of the Society of Colonial Wars and the Wednesday and Merchants clubs.
His wife, the former Louise Este Fisher, whom he married in 1926, died in 1988.
He is survived by two sons, Guy T. Hollyday of Baltimore and Este Fisher Hollyday of Nashville, Tenn.; a daughter, Louise E. Hollyday II of Sparks; six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements were incomplete yesterday.