The Walworthians: Granger, Harold and Nancy

The Walworthians: Granger, Nancy and Harold

A collection of telephone interviews published in the Wayne County STAR Newspaper and Wayne County MAIL Newspaper, 1994-209

by Kate Chamberlin

Harold and Nancy Granger

September 28, 1995

Harold and Nancy Granger are two of the people in our neighborhood. Alaska has always intrigued Harold. About seven years ago when a couple from their Square Dancing Group recommended Camp Denali, they took a vacation to Alaska. The Wilderness Camp for Adults in Denali National Park was the high point of their trip. They went again the next summer for a month.

The owners of the camp invited them to become staff members for the following summer. They accepted!

Harold did much of the carpentry work to open a second lodge for guests and continues to help keep things inhabitable. Nancy helps out with the laundry, serving and everything else to make a guest’s stay enjoyable.

The main lodge is more like a motel, but the newer lodge is made up of several cabins. It has a main shower room and an out-house. It is closer to nature.

“The country is just incredible,” Nancy said as her voice trailed off into memorable thoughts.

She mentioned that they’d met a bear or two on the trail. “They went their way and we went our way,” she said as if meeting a bear was an everyday occurrence!

“It’s the people,” Harold said. “The owners and the guests are just the greatest.”

Nancy Scott was born in Union Hill and brought up on her parent’s farm in Walworth. After they sold the farm. Her parents lived on High Street (just around the corner from Bill Youngman’s family) Nancy’s Aunt Pearl Scott still lives there.

Harold and Nancy attended Walworth Academy, in what she called “East Walworth”.

When I asked her where East Walworth was, she said, “Well, it’s called Walworth now, but it used to be Lincoln, West Walworth and East Walworth.”

We agreed that it was getting even more complicated with Blue Heron Hills and Gananda as part of Walworth–or are they part of West Walworth?

The Grangers were married in 1950 and lived in Ontario for 25 years. She enjoyed being home with their five children, but when the youngest was in Kindergarten she became the bookkeeper for Paul Schreiber. It was a full-time job that lasted 25 years. Actually, she still goes in to help out from time to time.

In 1983, they moved into the home they built on a portion of Harold’s parent’s farm in West Walworth.

When I talked with Nancy, she was baby-sitting one of their nine grand-children. She spoke proudly of their son, Alan, who is the Swim Instructor at the Ontario Golf Club.

Harold was born in West Walworth and maintains that he is a permanent resident of West Walworth, He just had a temporary stay (of 25 years) in Ontario!

“When I was growing up,” he said, “West Walworth was sort of considered the wrong side of town, probably because it had a bar in the center of it. The elite lived on the east side of Walworth and then there were the rest of us…”

The bar he mentioned became a grocery store and now houses several apartments.

After High School at the Walworth Academy, Harold attended Illinois School of Technology and then graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology. He was employed by Kodak for 36 years.

Traveling and photography are two of his hobbies. He as taken slides of their many trips and has them organized in carrousels. Occasionally he gives slide presentations to small groups. He has several terrific shots of bears in Alaska scooping salmon out of the river. His favorite subjects to snap are his grandchildren. He then enlarges the stills to admire or give as Gifts.

Harold is saddened to see so much building going on so near the Blue Heron’s rookery.

“If I ever win the lottery,” he said emphatically, “I’d buy up all the remaining land. Several years ago, I took a walk over where the Home-a-rama is. There were over 50 Blue Heron nests with fledglings in them. Where are they now?”

He hopes some of them will nest in the swampy area he owns behind his home.

Thank you for caring, Nancy and Harold. You are Walworthians, er, West Walworthians with the accent on Worth.

September 28, 2017 Up-Date: Harold and Nancy now live in a Webster graduated care village and are dealing with age related issues.