Always Virginia: A Girl's Life in Kampsville and Jacksonville, Illinois, and Routt High School in the 1920s and 1930s

A Woman’s Voice. A Memoir. In 1919, Virginia Day was born into 9,000 years of continuous local civilization in Kampsville near the Koster archeological site. Her diary is itself a charming anthropological artifact from the 1920s and 1930s. She hunted arrowheads and ginseng; delivered mail with her postman father; and was best friends with the Kamp twins, Edna and Edwina, at the Kamp Store owned by their father, Joseph Kamp, son of Kampsville’s founder. In 1991, the Kamp store became the Visitor’s Museum of the Center for American Archeology.

    At fourteen in 1933, she dared pay a pilot 75-cents to fly her over Kampsville and Jacksonville; and she began her eyewitness “Daily Diary” about high-spirited teen life in Jacksonville with jobs, movies, and dating at Routt High School where she met varsity scholarship letterman George Fritscher in 1935. Her brother John B. Day married them in July 1938.

    She left her heart in Kampsville and Jacksonville. On her last visit to Kampsville in 1980, she was as delighted to meet the young archeologists as they were to trade stories with her who donated to them the arrowheads, pottery shards, and river pearls she’d collected seventy years before anyone heard of Koster.

    This diary of a girl and her family is not a history of big world events. It’s a playful American story of Southern Illinois nostalgia told in the eager voice of the teenage author happily involved in family, courtship, and the popular culture of two small heartland towns.