Page 26 - Always Virginia

14 Virginia Day Fritscher

three generations. He is in Carrollton where my brother, his father,
owned the famous Day’s Café on the town square in the 1950s.”
For many years, James W. Day was a resident and presiding
circuit judge of the Seventh Circuit Court in Illinois. He was ad-
mitted to the bar in 1963, retiring from his post as circuit judge
on December 6, 2020. His son with Greene County historical
preservationist Dotty Allen Day, James Allen Day, became the
fourth-generation judge in the Day family when he received a
lifetime appointment as a United States Administrative Law Judge
in 2016. In 2013, Dotty Day saved the 130-year-old Fry Octago-
nal Barn in Carrollton. She collected its history, and, with the
engineering help of the Day cousins at J. J. Chumley Builders of
Whitehall, moved it three hundred feet out of the path of incom-
ing new homes to preserve it on their Day family farm where they
began living in 1970.
Virginia Day Fritscher’s father, Bartholomew Day III, was the
youngest son of Bartholomew, Junior, and Mary Lynch Day, and
married Mary Pearl Lawler Day in a private ceremony conducted
by the Reverend J. J. Furlong at St. Columbkille’s Church in St.
Louis on July 12,1911. Their marriage banns were not announced
from the pulpit and they were wed in secret to avoid threats from
Francis Devine, the fiancé Mary Pearl had dropped upon meeting
Bart/Batty that previous summer when she had taken the steam-
boat to visit her cousins in Hamburg—and in one version of their
meeting—saw Bart crossing a field, and said, “That’s the man I’m
going to marry.”
Her Lawler family, according to Judge John W. Day, “were
people of some means.” In her 1972 recorded interview, she recalled
her parents. Her father, John (Jack) Patrick Lawler, born of immi-
grant parents in St. Louis c. 1859, died there in 1920. Her mother,
Honorah Anastasia McDonough (1862-1925), was born in St. Louis
of parents whose four parents were immigrants from Ireland. She
once mentioned that one of her grandmothers was named Mary
Higgins. After her husband Jack Lawler’s death, Honorah lived