Page 38 - Always Virginia

26 Virginia Day Fritscher

gall-bladder surgery and went to the hospital in Jacksonville, Il-
linois, where she almost died. Daddy kept us at night. We had our
school picnic while my Mom was in hospital. Usually we never ate
often at my Aunt’s as we were five children in our family and they
only had two—a boy and a girl, Joe and Cecilia, older than my
oldest brother, John.
The Stelbrink boy was my cousin Joe, and on one occasion
when our school visited Springfield, Illinois, to see Lincoln’s tomb
and home, Joe was one of the drivers of the car I was riding in.
Just for the excitement of it, I gave him a quarter to pass a car on
the way home and he took it. That made my Daddy angry. Daddy
made Joe give the quarter back to me the next day. Joe mellowed
in his older years and married and had three or four children, but
his sister Cecilia, never married.
We had to call Cecilia’s friends “Miss Josephine,” “Miss
Mildred,” and “Miss Helen.” Those three were “the Kamps,” the
oldest girls in the Kamp family, and sisters of my best friends who
were the younger Kamp twins named Edna and Edwina Kamp,
for whose grandfather our town was named. The Kamp girls’
father owned a grocery store in Kampsville and outside on one of
the metal posts supporting the roof, one could get a small electric
shock by holding onto it and twirling around. The Kamp twins
and I did everything together—so much so that Sister Salvatore,
one of the German nuns teaching at St. Anselm’s school, tied us
together with rope one A.M.
Once, Sister Salvatore, who used to hit us with her pointer,
said to me when I spilled ink all over my dress, “Oh, Virginia Day,
you look like you fell in a sauerkraut barrel.” And Mom told me,
“Virginia Day, you tell Sister Salvatore that only Germans fall
in the sauerkraut.” Also at Christmastime, Santa visited at our
Christmas program, and he gave me a stick. He must have been
maybe a German nun dressed up like a German Santa, because
that’s a German custom of giving coal and a stick to bad children.
I cried, as, not being German, I was afraid my Irish Mom and