Barbara A. Hall, a former secretary who was a longtime volunteer at Greater Baltimore Medical Center, died Sunday of pneumonia at St. Joseph Medical Center. She was 92.

The daughter of a high school principal and a homemaker, the former Barbara Abbott was born in Fort Fair, Maine, and in 1926 moved with her family to Providence, R.I., where she graduated in 1937 from Hope Street High School.

She was a 1941 graduate of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where she earned a bachelor's degree in European history.

After teaching school for a year in Bryant Pond, Maine, where her annual salary was $900, Mrs. Hall moved to Boston and enrolled at Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School, from which she graduated in 1945.

She was working as a secretary in the dean's office at Harvard College when she was promoted to house secretary at Harvard's Kirkland House.

Mrs. Hall was sitting at her typewriter on her first day of work in her new job when a handsome World War II veteran, Richard Leland Hall, who was about to begin graduate studies, walked through the door.

"She said, 'He took me off the shelf,'" said a daughter, Nancy Abbott Cooper of Wilmington, Del.

The couple married in 1948 and remained at Harvard, where her husband earned his doctorate in organic chemistry.

In 1950, they moved to Rodgers Forge when Dr. Hall was hired by McCormick & Co. The couple later settled on Wellington Court in Stoneleigh, where they lived for many years, before moving in 2000 to the Blakehurst retirement community in Towson.

Mrs. Hall delivered her three daughters at the old Hospital for the Women of Maryland on Bolton Hill. After its 1965 merger with the Presbyterian Eye, Ear and Throat Charity Hospital that created Greater Baltimore Medical Center, she began volunteering at the new hospital.

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Barbara A. Hall, longtime GBMC volunteer