Walter Gretzky - Early Life

Early Life

Prior to World War I, Gretzky's father Anton (Tony) Gretzky immigrated along with his family to Canada via the United States from the Russian Empire (what is now Grodno, Belarus). Following the war, Anton would marry his wife, Mary, who immigrated from Pidhaitsi, interwar Poland (now Ukraine). Gretzky's ancestry is typically described as either Belarusian, Ukrainian, or Polish. In interviews, Walter Gretzky has stated that his parents were Belarusians, while on other occasions he has mentioned his family's Polish ancestry. The Gretzky family were landowners in the Russian Empire, and supporters of Tsar Nicholas II. However, according to Walter Gretzky, whenever anyone would ask his father if they were Russian, he would reply, "Nyet. Belarus." His father, Anton Gretzky, has also been described as having "been born in Russia with Ukrainian forebears". In addition, "the only Slavic language spoken in the Gretzky family Ukrainian," of which Walter was a fluent speaker.

Tony and Mary owned a 25-acre (10 ha) cucumber farm in Canning, Ontario where Walter Gretzky was born and raised. This is where he met his future wife, Phyllis Hockin at a wiener roast when she was 15 and he was 18. She was related to British General Sir Isaac Brock, a hero of the War of 1812. They married in 1960, and moved to Brantford, Ontario, where Gretzky worked for Bell Telephone Canada. The family moved into a house on Varadi Avenue in Brantford seven months after the birth of their son, Wayne Gretzky, chosen partly because it was flat enough to make an ice rink on every winter. The couple would later have a daughter, Kim (b. 1963), and three more sons, Keith, Glen and Brent. Unlike Walter, who did Sharp ViewCam commercials with Wayne and Wayne's son, Ty, Phyllis Gretzky mostly refused to embrace the celebrity that sprang from their son's exploits, although she did a commercial with Wayne for ProStars Cereal in the 1980s, and appeared in the video Wayne Gretzky: Above and Beyond (1990).