300 years, 300 minutes, 300 walnuts.

Just a brief 300 year ago both sides of my family migrated from southern Germany/Switzerland to Pennsylvania. Remember there was no "Germany" or "Switzerland" labeled on the political map back then. As proof I have a print-out from a geneological website which has the Blochers and the Minnichs intermarrying even back then, back there. Now, how they got together in the year 1940 and decided to get married again, beats me. My mother told me they met at church camp and, deciding that that was safe territory for finding a spouse, got married. As I was a youngster my father taught me a lot by example. Walnuts are at the kernel of what he taught me. He brought me to the English walnut tree located at the court, a rental property he cared for with great diligence. He showed me the change from bright green hulls to old black hulls which occurs over time. We then took a lug box full of nuts home where we hammered, cracked and sorted them by the hour in front of the fireplace or the television. My father normally couldn't sit still long enough to see a full episode of "Paladin" or "Gunsmoke", but the nuts kept us busy. Next the nut meats were roasted carefully in a slow oven. This was a delicacy at the Minnich house.
Just this week I read in the daily morning column: "Guten Morgen!" in the local paper the story of a reader who bought hazelnuts in the shell and decided to hull them in front of the television in order to make his favorite nut cake. Well, it took much longer than anticipated and the television evening got longer and longer until in the end, the spouse of said nutcracker lost her patience and turned off the tube. The cake did however fortunately get made.
Pulling it all together, I was inspired to purchase a large sack of whole walnuts at the monthly flea market here in Münster not long ago and bring the traditional shelling ritual back to the Old Country once again. You know how it is at the flea market, you stroll along, getting interested in stuff, but mostly not actually stopping to buy things. This young man insisted that I wait while he cracked me a nut and gave it to me to taste and by then I HAD to buy the sackful. The next step was much more challenging however. There was no nutcracker to be found and so I grabbed the hammer. I laid it down again quite quickly once I felt the reverberations in the entire apartment building when I started to pound on a nut on a wooden board on a carpet on the floor. It just wasn't going to work. With the help of an email and a friend I had a real nutcracker in my hands by the next day. I was determined to make an "Engadinertorte", one of my favorite Swiss recipes. I was somewhat hampered by not having a small pick-like instrument which I usually use to pick out the small pieces of nutmeat, but with enough cracks of the nutcracker, we got the job done. All the walnuts which didn't go into the torte went into the slow-roasting pan and success was at hand.
My questions remain: Did my father have this practice, this habit in his genes (his German genes) or did his father teach him to do this, and his father before him, etc.? Will my son take after his grandfather and crack walnuts in his living room?