And coming...

My maternal great-grandparents lived in Wyandotte, Michigan. But at the time their only child, my grandfather, was born they were living in New Mexico. So...Frederick Dow Campbell was born June 15, 1902, in Raton, New Mexico.

The house in the front of this picture was theirs. The one in the back was what my mom called "the little house" and was where she lived with her parents, until one day, when she was about 6 or 7, her parents separated and she and her mother moved to Detroit. She was never let in on the reasons and to this day wonders what happened to their little family.

This is a picture of my grandfather, Frederick Dow Campbell as a young boy. See children...all those poses I could have put you in and didn't!!! Consider yourself lucky.

I'm not quite sure what, or where, he was going hunting but perhaps this is where some of the "outdoorsman gene" in the family comes from.

This is my grandpa Campbell. Lookin' pretty snazzy!!

Grandpa had several jobs. One was as a milk truck driver. The other was running a gas station. Here's a "blast from the past". What is that he's wearing around his waist?







When I was pretty small...about 16 months...my mom took me on the train from California to Michigan to meet all of my relatives back there. A litle while ago,she gave me a bunch of pictures from the trip and wrote a note saying, " The Campbell grandparents were so happy to meet and spoil Kathy". The pictures above are from that trip. The one on the front porch of the Campbell home in Wyandotte is of Mom, her Dad (Fred), and his mother (Adelaide). The other one is of me and my grandpa. This was the first and last time I ever saw him.

Grandpa Campbell was not quite 49 years old when he went to the incinerator (which is a furnace for burning trash). In starting it, he put kerosene on the fire and it exploded back onto him and burned him over a large part of his body. His official cause of death, on May 3, 1951, was listed as pneumonia (which is not uncommon for a burn victim). Because Mom was in the hospital after just having my brother, Richard, she could not go to the funeral. Later, when she and Dad went back to Michigan, most of his belongings were given away. Her step-mother... and her mother...would not let her have much at all.

Much of the information I have about Grandpa Campbell comes from Mom, naturally. She says he was a kind man, a hard worker, and she loved to go visit him in the summers. He re-married after her parents divorced and she never really got along with her step-mother but loved her dad!!! Iwish I could have gotten to know him.