My maiden name is German, but amazingly enough we are French, almost full-blooded French. I don’t speak it anymore, but at one time that was about all that was spoken in our household. Our grandparents met coming over on the boat from the Old Country.

My grandparents met on the boat coming over from France as teenagers. My grandparents, my grandmother’s parents, never did learn to speak English and they settled in Michigan and my grandparents of my grandfather’s family settled in Paulding County Ohio.

We have relatives out in Williams County and Paulding County over into a little ways into Indiana, so we have – and we have a yearly reunion at my house with the few that’s left out of the ones that want to get together. My grandmother, great-grandmother had seven children.

She was widowed young and I have no idea how she raised them or how she kept a roof over their heads. I just know that she was widowed young. And, as I say, my grandmother Beucler’s – we say Beucler in Hancock County, it’s really Beucler.

And, as I say, they spoke no English and I know I’m not pronouncing it right by they were from the Sault Sainte Marie region in France. I could understand what they were saying but I don’t speak it anymore. That’s been a long time ago.

My great-grandparents passed away when I was about six or seven.

My father was Russell Smaltz, and he passed away when I was a senior in high school.
My mother raised the five of us. She had four-year-old twins at that time and they were quite a bit younger than I am and she did a marvelous job.

When I quit high school instead of going on to college I worked and helped her with, you know, money to raise the rest of the other three boys at home.

My dad was just a jack of all trades. He drove a milk truck to dairy farms and went around and picked up milk and too it to the dairies to be processed and he had his fingers in farming. Just a little bit of everything. He didn’t really – no formal education.

My mom was a homemaker for years and after my father passed away she did supplement her social security with working as a cook at various restaurants here in town.

He had a gallbladder operation and at that time it was a great thing for them to tell you to use substitute salt and his body was allergic to it and he filled up with water and just drowned in his own fluids.

But you know, I was born just coming out of the Depression and everyone was in the same boat. We didn’t know we were poor. My parents did of course, but all of us, you know, all the kids at school were all in the same boat pretty much and none of us had even the idea or conception that we were poor.