Walter Willie Baldwin was born November 22, 1892 in the small farming village of Lewiston in Utica Township, Winona County, Minnesota. He was the eighth child of Lewis James and Helen Jane (Jones) Baldwin. Born into an agrarian family, Walter worked on his father's farm and, as a rambunctious child, got into his share of scrapes with the authorities. One day, Walter and several of his friends, along with the local judge's daughter, decided to steal watermelons from a farmer's patch. They took the judge's burro with them to help haul the fruit. When the farmer came out of his home, Walter and his friends started to run. The burro sat down and neither Walter nor the judge's daughter could get him to move. The farmer shot at the children with a gun loaded with rock salt, so the burro had to be abandoned. The next day, the farmer brought the burro to the judge to tell him about the heist. The judge told the kids to go hide the evidence and Walter and the judge's daughter took the burro and hid him in the hayloft for the next two weeks. Walter's next scrape with the law was not as frivolous. Walter attended the local school in Lewiston, and might have continued his education except for a run-in with the schoolteacher. When the teacher punished Walter for some wrongdoing, Walter went home and got his whip, returned to the school and gave the schoolteacher an old-fashioned horsewhipping. Walter left town immediately after the episode, knowing that his own father would have arrested him for the act. He spent the next six months working in a cow camp as a cow hand, and after returning to Lewiston, eventually moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota. There, he spent some time as an amateur boxer, establishing a pretty good reputation, but he received his first lesson toward giving up boxing as a career, when a "ringer" was brought in for a bout. The boxer used the laces of his gloves to cut up Walter in the ring, and that episode cut short his boxing career.

Elizabeth Viola Lawrence was born on March 7, 1887 in the small lumber town of Oconto Falls, Wisconsin. She was the first of five children born to Charles Admerl and Theresea (Sheprow) Lawrence. Her father, Charles, died tragically in a fall from a power house about 1892, leaving Theresea with no means of support and five children to raise. Theresea, being illiterate, was apparently talked into signing a document which released four of her five children to an orphanage in Portage, Wisconsin. Elizabeth eventually was adopted by a family named Scott. Little is known of her early life, mainly because of the newly formed adoption laws, which required the sealing of birth records. At some time, she picked up the nickname 'Lizzie' and it stuck with her throughout her life. She was apparently treated badly by the Scott family and left, eventually ending up in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where she spent some time as an officer in the Volunteers of America.

It was while serving in her position with the Volunteers of America that Walter and Lizzie first met. Lizzie would go anywhere for a worthy cause, and was attempting to collect money for the Working Woman's Home when she entered a bar in Saint Paul. Walter was drinking in the bar, and was rather taken with Lizzie's long braid of red hair. He grabbed and pulled on it, and she back-handed him, knocking him off his stool. Not to be thwarted by her action, Walter followed her out of the bar, but in his inebriated condition, collapsed into a snow bank. This romantic eepisode was apparently a successful one, as Walter joined the Volunteers of America and became a Lieutenant in the organization, and later married Elizabeth on January 25, 1910 in Saint Paul. This union produced eleven children, including Ina Helen 'Toots,' Lewis Earl (who died at the age of 2 1/2 months), Ida Viola, Walter Willie, Jr., Alice Annabelle, Margaret Myrtle, Delbert Lawrence, Elizabeth Mae, Eleanor Marie, Phyllis Betty Jean, and Patricia Ruth.

After their marriage, Walter and Lizzie began a sixteen year migration process that eventually led them to the first home that they could call their own, in Sacramento County, California. They lived first in Saint Paul, Minnesota, then in Springfield, Missouri. After their third child was born, they moved to California, living successively in Red Bluff, Biggs, Gridley, Live Oak, Bryte, Elverta, and Del Paso Heights. During this period, Walter spent much of his time as a teamster, using his horses to haul hay and other products as needed by other farmers. In the Sacramento Valley area, his team of horses was used to develop many of the small levees needed to maintain the rice fields in the valley. Walter provided a great deal of his family's financial support with his horse-trading skills. He would often be gone for weeks at a time, looking for horses that he could use and/or sell for profit. At the end of his sojourns, he would arrive back to his family with up to 100 horses in tow, then head out for several more weeks at a time to sell the horses.

Lizzie was a hard-working and resourceful homemaker who raised the ten children, often in the absence of Walter as he went off for weeks at a time to do his horse trading. Her days were filled with washing clothes on a washboard and cooking family meals on a wood stove. At times, she had to do it with a lack of funds. Breakfast for the children sometimes consisted of a homemade cereal of water with a thickening agent and flavor added. Often, she would also cook meals for a large contingent of ranch hands, as they helped Walter handle the horses. It was during one of Walter's long sojourns away from the family that Lizzie decided the farm field needed to be tended, so she hooked up a horse to the plow and proceeded to plow 40 acres.

As the need for horses began to wane, and the "Great Depression" took it's toll, Walter sought other means of financial support. It was in Gridley that he first went to work for the California Packing Corporation (C.P.C., currently known as Del Monte Cannery) a company with which he would eventually spend the next three decades. He moved to the Sacramento area in about 1929, and worked as a state licensed steam operator for C.P.C., where he became one of the founders of the Cannery Workers Union. In about 1935, Walter opened the Woodlake Riding Stables in Sacramento and, with his eldest son, Walter, Jr., operated this business for the next four years. During this time, they supplied all the horses for the Woodlake Polo Club, and even played on the team, themselves.

During their Sacramento stay, Walter and Lizzie built their first home on a 20 acre parcel in Del Paso Heights, and farmed the land with hay, chickens, pigs, cows and horses. For recreation, Walter and Lizzie would often take trips in their paneled station wagon back east, but he would never take Lizzie to Southern California. There, he would venture alone, taking his vehicle into backwoods areas, and into the desert. It was in Death Valley that he met a man named Walter Scott who, Walter would say, "had a marvelous home in the desert." The two Walters would spend time together, camping and fishing. It was later that he would learn that Walter was the famous eccentric millionaire, Death Valley Scotty.

In March, 1958, Walter and Lizzie celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary (they had always claimed marriage in 1908) with a ceremony performed by the Volunteers of America, the organization in which they had served together prior to their marriage. After 29 years with C.P.C., Walter retired. On March 4, 1964, he died at the stated age of 76 (actually 71) of heart disease. His wife, Lizzie, continued for nearly a dozen more years, but finally succumbed on September 20, 1976 at the age of 88. Walter and Lizzie now rest together in the Sunset Lawn Cemetery in North Sacramento.