Page 46 - Always Virginia

34 Virginia Day Fritscher

who was about twelve, got up to stretch, and Milo thought Jim-
mie was coming after him, so he threw a rock at him, and hit him
in the head and Doctor Woltman said if it’d been a quarter inch
closer to his brain it would have killed him. Jimmie won a bike
selling the paper, The State Register, and I can always remember
trying to get on it and ride it, but I was too small. I was so small,
and a year ahead of myself in school, and I made my First Com-
munion at St. Anselm’s when I was only five, because my brother
John, who became a priest, took me to the pastor and told him I
knew everything the six-year-olds knew. As a result, I graduated
from high school when I was sixteen.
Another game we used to play in the yard was Mumbly Peg.
On midnight Christmas eve, we’d all be awakened and taken
to Midnight Mass, but we couldn’t look at our toys before we
went or when we came back. We had to wait until morning. One
Christmas eve I remember my sister, Norine, saying she wanted
a manicure set and it was there the next morning. We thought
Santa had gone by the window when she said it. One year we got
“Bye-Lo-Babies” made by Grace Story Putnam who copied off her
own three-day-old baby. There’s a “Bye-Lo-Baby” in the museum at
Springfield now. There weren’t too many made. Ours got broken.
We should have ordered new heads for them.
We used to play movie stars a lot. We cut out pictures of them
and then made them up to pretend they were going to parties.
As I mentioned, there was one movie theater in Kampsville and
the first movies I saw were silent. The first sound movie I saw was
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, after my brother John came back from
Jacksonville when I was nine or ten and told us at Jacksonville they
had talking movies and you could hear them breathe. Some years
later, I got some horse hair from the tail of Tom Mix’s movie-star
horse when he was at the fair in Jacksonville. I just walked in and
asked if I could clip some souvenir hair and they let me.
From my money I earned when I was fourteen selling hosiery, I
also spent 75 cents and took a ride by myself with a pilot in a little