Page 50 - Always Virginia

38 Virginia Day Fritscher

All of us on the tour later went to what they had turned into
a museum, but to me was still the old local butcher shop where I
remember always being given a weiner by the butcher, Polly Rice.
I remember going down there on afternoons in the summer and
getting cold Nehi soda, especially grape, orange, and strawberry.
The lady who was in charge of the museum was named Marguerite
Becker. Her maiden name was Schumann, and she and her family
had lived on my Daddy’s mail route. She said how much respect
they all had for our family and for Daddy as a mail carrier and for
Mom who was so sweet.
One of the archaeologists who was with us most of the time was
Lisanne Traxler, and she said if I ever write a book about Kamps-
ville, she wants a copy of it. The Arkies have forty-two sites in the
Kampsville area where they are digging. Students from different
schools come in and help them in the summer.
The last place we visited was behind the museums which was
the backyard of the old doctor’s house. The Arkies had built many
little primitive huts like the people built in that era before we all
came along. In fact, the Arkies were demonstrating building one
of the huts out of cattails and mud.
At the end, we all walked back to Kampsville Inn and got in
our cars, crossed the ferry, and headed back to Peoria. We stopped
at Jacksonville to get gas, almost 45 miles from Kampsville. In
Jacksonville, I spent my next 10 years, from eleven to twenty-one
(April 1941), and was married there and gave birth to Jack at Our
Saviour’s Hospital in 1939. Then we stopped in Virginia to eat
dinner—a marvelous restaurant for a small town—that attracted
people from all around, the way my brother Jimmie’s “Day’s Café”
in Carrollton attracted people from all over in the 1950s. While
we were in the restaurant, a terrible rain storm, with wind that
turned into the usual tornado came up. The lights went out three
times and rain was gushing down the plate-glass windows. It was
like someone was sloshing buckets of water on them. We needed
my Mom throwing burning palm out into the storm. By the time