Saturday Night Movies and Butterscotch Sundaes

During an era of national economic crisis, the Critchfields provided their daughters with a priceless delight in music that would carry into their adult lives. Ken and Jessica also managed, despite straitened circumstances, to take young Virginia and Carol to the movies every Saturday night, treating them afterward to butterscotch sundaes, a memory both sisters treasured. The notion that entertainment can be self-generated, that the pleasures of artistic expression can be self-taught, practiced, and shared with others, is an invaluable lesson, and because of their parents' generosity and ingenuity, the Critchfield sisters absorbed it well.

In 1930, the family left St. Louis and returned to Illinois, initially settling at 201 North Cuyler Avenue in Oak Park and later at 851 North Euclid Street. According to the Fifteenth Census of the United States, April 1930, Ken Critchfield (age forty-five), who was employed as a stationary engineer at an ice plant, Jessica (forty-two), Virginia (eighteen), Carol (fourteen), and [maternal grandmother] Cora Higley (sixty-nine), a widow at that time, all lived together in Oak Park Village. The series of family moves suggests Ken Critchfield's need to follow employment opportunities. In at least one instance, he was separated from his family, working elsewhere to provide a secure environment for Virginia and Carol-while his wife, daughters, and mother-in law stayed in one place. Years later in 1964, Virginia, who was fifty-three at the time, paid the following spontaneous tribute to her parents in an audio "living letter" recorded at her home on Normandy Place in Evanston, Illinois:

Hi Ken and Dearie,

This is Gin, recording to you from my own control tower up here on the second floor overlooking the garden. It's Thursday, February 6, and the time is just 12:30 in the afternoon. I've just received your tape and had the joy of playing it, and I couldn't help thinking again how warm and touching and beautifully worded your little, shall I say, your tribute, was to all of us, Daddy, when you relayed it again in a nostalgic way, the happy Christmases we had when we were a family living together in Oak Park. Indeed, those are times we'll cherish to the end of our days, and though Carol and I probably have never expressed our gratitude adequately, I'm sure you know, and if not, I want you to know it now, from me and from the bottom of my heart, how much Carol and I appreciated all that you two did for us to keep our family together when the times were not always so easy.

Particularly, Carol and I now, as adults ourselves, can appreciate and understand the sacrifice you made for us when you lived apart so long just so we could keep our home in Oak Park, and we girls could continue in school and remain with our friends in an atmosphere that had been home for us. In other words, Daddy, rather than disrupt the whole family and pull up the roots again and move us off to New York or New Jersey or wherever it was that you had to be exiled for over a year, you let us remain in Oak Park, in that beautiful home, which we did love so much, and you and Mother really made a supreme sacrifice to spend all of that time separated. And as I say, now I appreciate completely what that meant. And I hope I can convey that to you both now.

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