Packwood was the engineer, R. H. Packwood, Wally was Mrs Taylor's father and Dad was her grandfather Fred.
The last two were Bignells, one of a number of Mrs Taylor's family who lived at Lake Waitaki Village when the dam was being built and who coined the phrase for PWD.
Born in Auckland in 1928, she travelled as a babe in arms with her mother and a toddler to the Waitaki dam to join her father, Walter, and grandfather, Fred, who worked on the dam as overseer and supervisor respectively.
"It must have been quite an effort with a toddler and a young baby, particularly as mother suffered from travel sickness," she said.
Until she was 6, when the dam was finished, they lived in a public works house provided for permanent workers below the dam. The work camp stretched over a huge distance, from the plateau above the dam site (where the original concrete-block houses still stand in Lake Waitaki Village) to land downstream.
They were surrounded by family - her grandfather and his family lived next door and cousins lived "over the back fence".
Mrs Taylor remembers the wooden house. It had a central kitchen with a bedroom at either end and a sunroom entrance lined with wood.
The toilet was out the back, emptied once a week into a night cart. There was only cold running water.
"The sunroom was the hub of our early childhood. For some reason, we were allowed to draw on the wooden lining and our parents proudly showed off our artwork," Mrs Taylor said.
That was until her older sister, Kathleen, drew a graphic picture of her young brother wetting his pants. The artwork was stopped.
The sunroom was the venue for family concerts, featuring her grandfather and father singing old music-hall favourites - "the verses are still with me".
When the project was finished, her grandparents' house was shifted to Waimate. Up until two years ago, it was still there in Cameron St.
One year, there was a big snowfall and freeze, which was "fun and fluffy" at first. The children played in the snow, but as the days wore on the cold became intense, with icicles hanging from roofs.
Her father brought in snow to melt in a pot, and her mother put on a fur coat to light the stove in the morning.
A local man used to come around with a horse and cart to collect kitchen scraps for his pigs. Luckily, the horse knew the way, because his owner often slept on the cart.
"One day, he was not only asleep, but had put his lit pipe in his pocket and was rocking along on his cart in a cloud of smoke. While others screamed in horror, Granny calmly fetched a bucket of water and quenched him with perfect aim," she said.
That produced a "torrent of swear words" she had never heard before. Her grandmother was unfazed.
One of her most vivid memories was of running away from a cow when she was going to meet her grandfather.
She fell into a trench. Looking up, all she could see were sheer walls and a patch of sunlight, then her grandfather's face and an arm reaching down for her.
"It was so comforting walking home after that holding his big hand."
Waitaki dam children went by train each day to school in Kurow. "I belonged to the unlucky age group shut out of school until they were 6 because of a teacher shortage."
She went by train to see the school dental nurse. The train went past the Kurow Cemetery and older children told ghost stories to scare younger children, including one about a recent murder, after which the murderer was hanged.
The YMCA hall was the centre of the construction village for years, the venue for every function. That included kindergarten, slide shows, meetings, fancy-dress parties and, on one occasion a movie.
"The only part [of the movie] I can remember is pictures of some airmen. My big sister nudged me and told me to poke out my tongue because they could see me," she said.
