Maybe the title of this post is a little over-inflated 🙂 but I am going back as far as I know about family.

My mom never talked about her family and I only met a brother once so I can’t say much about that side of my family. Much more about mom in that regard in incoming posts.  The only experiences with family  was on my dad’s side.  Grandpa Walters was a pig farmer and I believe his father was also a pig farmer. It is what he did. He had a farm of about forty acres near Belle Union Indiana. It had a couple of big old wooden barns and of course serveral pig pens and a chicken coop.

His house was nothing fancy, even for those times.  There was a fuel oil stove in the center of the house that served as the heat during those cold Indiana winters.  Plumbing was added sometime before I was born so there was now a kitchen sink and a bump-out in the back that was the bathroom.  But even with these new-fangled things grandpa refused to take down the outhouse and even preferred using it instead of the inside one when he was working his pigs.

I do remember the stories about grandpa’s grandpa being a trapper and had married a local Shawnee squaw in the 1800’s. I always thought that was neat and have been proud of my Native American heritage ever since. I guess that makes me ⅛ Shawnee but since I have pretty high cheekbones I think my heritage  shows.

Now on to the skeleton in the Walters’ closet. Grandma Walters never lived with grandpa during my lifetime. I never could get a straight story out of dad about that but it seems that grandpa chased grandma off the farm with a shotgun and she never came back! They never divorced and they were eventually buried side-by-side but they never saw each other after that fateful event. What caused the split I just don’t know.

Grandma she was a house-mother at a DePauw University fraternity in Greencastle Indiana.  When she retired she moved to a studio apartment and that is where I remember visiting with her. Neither grandma or grandpa ever had a bad word to say about the other, at least to us kids.

Grandma died when I was about eight years old and grandpa when I was ten or eleven so I never had any kind of extended relationship with them.  The most vivid memory I have is when we visited grandpa one of my duties was to get the morning eggs from the hen house.  Grandpa said we couldn’t have breakfast until that chore was done. But in reality he just enjoyed watching me get chased around the chicken yard by a very ornery rooster. He scared the dickens out of me. 🙂

Anybody care to share a grandparent story??