BACKHOE: Curly Walters didn’t always intend to go into the excavating business.

His business venture begins with the story of how he became the first person in Bradford to own a backhoe.

Curly’s mother-in-law lived for awhile in a house right next door to him and his wife, but his mother-in-law’s home was eventually sold to a man named Robbie.

Robbie called Curly up one day because he was having septic tank trouble and needed help digging it up.

They tried, but “it was just like digging in the concrete sidewalk,” Curly said.

They decided they needed a backhoe to dig in the ground, but nobody in Bradford or Olean, N.Y., sold backhoes. A business owner at the Ford dealership in Salamanca, N.Y., contacted a buddy at a Jeep dealership in Buffalo, N.Y.

About a week later, Curly and Robbie were the proud owners of a Jeep that had a backhoe installed on it just for him.

“All this time Robbie has no bathroom,” Curly noted.

He got the backhoe home, and it was probably only half an hour before the septic tank was open and running.

It was for at least a couple of months that the pair shared ownership of the little-used piece of equipment. Then, Curly and his father bought Robbie’s half.

Curly had been working at Zippo at the time, but Curly and his father decided to go into business together as Walters & Son Excavating Contractors.

Curly’s first excavating job was to fix the sewer system belonging to a woman in Rew.

“Boy, I had no idea what I was doing,” he said, recalling the difficult time he had figuring out how to dig in one direction without have to get out to readjust the equipment.

It was thanks to a little rigging by his father that he was soon able to use the backhoe with ease.