For more than 25 years, spring visitors to Petrified Springs Park have been greeted by wave after wave of daffodils. The park road that bisects the golf course is lined with daffs all the way up the hill.

The daffodils were planted in the 1980s by workers as a project of the United Auto Workers Community Action Program.

UAW Local 960 union leader Walter Garin and his wife Paulette helped plant those flowers. It was just a small example of how Garin gave back to his community.

A lifelong Kenosha resident, Walter, 74, died May 28, 2010, leaving his daughter Paulette, sisters Patricia Nelson and Margarett Haubrich, several nieces and nephews and many friends.

Strong couple

Walter met his future bride, Paulette C. Walters, through mutual acquaintances, many who thought the two were brother and sister. Walter asked her out on a date the first day he met her.

“Mom always said she knew she was going to marry him from the first time she met him,” their daughter Paulette said.

The couple married on June 10, 1961. They were married 45 years before his wife died in 2007. He never got over losing her.

“At the core of who the two of them were, they had such high integrity and respect for each other. I knew they trusted each other implicitly,” Paulette said.

Visual impairment

Many people may not have known it, but Walter was severely visually impaired from childhood. To read something, he had to hold the material close to his face and off to the side.

In elementary school, he was put into the district’s “sight-saving school” for visually impaired students. He didn’t like being separated from his friends at Weiskopf Elementary School.

Throughout his life he developed coping mechanisms to deal with his visual disabilities and his dyslexia. He listened to machinery and engines and figured out how to fix and adjust mechanical parts through touch.

Because reading was so difficult, he memorized everything he read, and as a result developed an extraordinary memory.

“He was union treasurer for over 35 years, and it always balanced to the penny,” Paulette said.

Paulette remembers being a child and sitting on her father’s lap, reading the Wall Street Journal with him. The practice helped her with her reading skills and current events knowledge, but she didn’t realize until she was older that because of his poor vision, she was helping him by reading the paper aloud.

Union ties

Walter worked for MacWhyte Co. for 43 years before retiring in 1999. His employment there led to a lifelong union affiliation.

In addition to serving as the treasurer of UAW Local 960, he also served as union steward, benefits representative and recreation committee chairman for the local.

He was elected and served as president of the Union Club board of trustees for more than a decade. Under his guidance, the Union Club’s downtown facility was sold to Kenosha County and a new Union Club was built on north 39th Avenue.

In the early 1960s, Walter led a successful wildcat strike at MacWhyte because the company wasn’t providing heat to every part of the plant in the dead of winter. The situation was so dire even the non-union members walked out, Paulette said.

The action was an example of Garin’s leadership skills. He would hold his ground, but wasn’t the type to yell or raise his voice. He detested bickering and squabbles.

Travel and cards

He loved to travel and visited 46 of the 50 states. Near the end of his life, Walter took up Texas hold’em poker, qualifying for and playing in local tournaments.

Garin lived with leiomyosarcoma, a rare, incurable cancer, for the last dozen years of his life, far outlasting his doctor’s initial prognosis of three months. He endured multiple surgeries, but stayed strong mentally through it all.

Paulette said she thought of her father as not so much of a religious man, but a deeply spiritual one.

“For all he went through, any other person I know of would have never had the positive outlook he had,” Paulette said.