Always Virginia: by Virginia Day Fritscher & Jack Fritscher & Jack Fritscher ISBN 9781890834432, 1890834432 instant download

Always Virginia: by Virginia Day Fritscher & Jack Fritscher & Jack Fritscher ISBN 9781890834432, 1890834432 instant download

A Memoir and Diary of a Girl’s Life in Kampsville and Jacksonville, Illinois, and Routt High School in the 1920s and 1930s.

A Woman’s Voice. A Girl’s Diary. A Family Memoir. In 1919, Virginia Day was born into 9,000 years of continuous local civilization in Kampsville near the Koster archeological site in Calhoun County. Her diary is itself a charming anthropological artefact of the 1920s and 1930s. She hunted arrowheads and ginseng. She delivered mail with her postman father. She sat in the courtroom of her granduncle, Judge John T. Day. She was best friends with the Kamp twins, Edna and Edwina, at the Kamp Store owned by their father, Joseph Kamp, son of Kampsville’s founder. In 1991, the Kamp store became the Visitor’s Museum of the Center for American Archeology.

Turning 14 in 1933 at the height of the Depression, she dared pay a young barnstorming air-circus pilot 75-cents to fly her over Kampsville and Jacksonville. When she stepped off the plane, she began her little eyewitness “Daily Diary” about typical teen life and family in Jacksonville. She wrote about jobs, movies, and dating at Routt High School. While she was literary editor of the school paper, she met varsity scholarship letterman George Fritscher in 1935. Her brother, the Catholic military chaplain John B. Day, married the couple at Our Saviour’s Church in July 1938. 

She left her heart in Kampsville and Jacksonville. On her last visit to Kampsville in 1980, she was as delighted to meet the young archeologists as they were to trade stories with her who donated to them the arrowheads, pottery shards, and river pearls she’d collected sixty years before the world heard of Koster. One of the young Arkies told her, “If you ever write a book about this, let me know.”

This scrapbook diary of a girl and her family of Irish immigrants who arrived in 1850 is not a history of big world events. It’s a traditional American story of Southern Illinois nostalgia told in the eager voice of the teenage author h