Page 56 - Always Virginia

44 Virginia Day Fritscher

Nordbusch, who ran the locks, kept his family there. He had two
boys and the older one, Norbert Nordbusch, was very, very stuffy.
When my oldest brother, John, came home from Routt High School
in Jacksonville, that stuffy boy Norbert strutted out to meet him
and said, “Well, Johnny, did you ‘paaass’ in everything.” It was
always a rather standing joke we made on each other. “Did you
‘paaass’ in everything?” In the church history book the present
priest interviews Mrs. Nordbusch who is now in her 90th year.
The Nordbusch’s finally moved to Peoria for Mr. Nordbusch to
take care of the locks during the War in the 1940s.
I don’t want to forget one of the highlights of my first eleven
years was shaking hands with Governor Len Small, then the gov-
ernor of Illinois. We were attending a centennial in Hardin and I
walked right up to the Governor and shook his hand. Speaking of
Hardin, they had a bad cyclone there when I was about nine, and
we went down to view the destruction. A piano was hurled out
of a home and hanging on an electric wire. I always seemed to be
involved in weather—like dust storms so thick coming home from
school that in those years we started washing our hair every day.
We had chatauquas with vaudeville acts and concerts and
speeches in Kampsville. One time a ventriloquist came to town and
his little dummy kept mentioning names of people in the town,
and we couldn’t figure out how he knew them all, and made such
a joke. The chatauquas were held in a big tent set up in the vacant
lots across from my Aunt Mag’s [Day-Stelbrink] house.
What is the Kampsville Inn now where some of our party
stayed in 1980 (used to be a hotel as I mentioned before), but one
side of it was a grocery store owned by people the name of Hart-
man and their daughter, Theresa, who for some reason was crazy
about bridge tally score cards and I’d always sell her all the cards
I collected from the tables of ladies after Mom had one of Kamps-
ville’s famous continuing bridge parties at our house, or went to
one and brought me the cards. Theresa paid me from two to five
cents each and I used the money for fun. I assume Theresa could