Page 27 - Always Virginia

Always Virginia 15

with her only daughter’s family in Kampsville where she retreated
to an upstairs room and died in April 1925.
Bart and Mary Pearl Day began their family of five children
in Hamburg with their firstborn son, the handsome and athletic
John Bartholomew Day, a young newspaper reporter for five years
for the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, who was ordained a Catholic
priest in 1938 and was a chaplain serving with the rank of Major
in the Battle of the Bulge. During the blizzard snowstorms of
that bloody and confusing turmoil over Christmas 1944 and
New Year’s 1945, the U. S. Secretary of War sent Western Union
Telegrams that both he and his brother-in-law, Jim Chumley, were
each reported, separately, as “missing in action” in the Ardennes
Forest. Weeks later, they were reported safe. At that time, families
dreaded seeing the uniformed Western Union boy park his bicycle
and ring the doorbell to deliver a telegram on yellow paper pasted
with tickertape text that read like this: “Washington D. C. Date.
Address: Parent or Spouse. The Secretary of War desires me to
express his deep regret that your son (Name and Rank) has been
reported missing in action since (sample) seventeen December in
Belgium. If further details or information are received you will be
promptly notified. —James Alexander Ulio, The ADJ General.” On
March 22, 1945, a news photo of Major John B. Day, chaplain, was
printed on the front pages of newspapers across the country, and
in Time magazine, April 2, 1945, showing him standing in mud
in a huge field of open graves and thousands of crosses, saying Last
Rites while burying unidentified American soldiers in the largest
Allied military cemetery in Europe at Henri Chapelle, Belgium.
Father John B. Day, as he signed himself, then served as a par-
ish priest in Collinsville, Quincy, Granite City, and Springfield.
When his father retired from thirty years with the postoffice in
1948, he invited his parents to leave their apartment on Delmar
Boulevard in St. Louis, and live with him in his St. Cabrini parish
house in Springfield where they became “Father John’s gardener
and housekeeper.” Insofar as Father John became the Day family