Virginia would honor her grandmother's words throughout her life, frequently quoting Christian Science sayings and prayers. Neatly inscribed in her baby book is the first Christian Science prayer Virginia memorized:

Now I lay me down to sleep;
I know that God his child does keep.

God is my all; I know no fear,
since God and Love and Truth are near.

I know that God my life is nigh.
I live in Him; I cannot die.

God is my health; I can't be sick.
God is my strength, unfailing, quick.

Cora Higley's letters, teachings, and prayer treatments made an indelible impression on both granddaughters, and, grandmother's positive influence. The numerous letters from Cora to Virginia underscore the unique spiritual tenor of their relationship.

As a practitioner,a kind of pastor or lay minister, Cora performed "treatments" upon members of her family, assisting with the various challenges and troubles in their lives through prayer. Much like the Quaker faith, Christian Science offered a rare public space and an opportunity for women, in this case as practitioners, to effect spiritual leadership both in their families and within the broader Christian community.

Virginia and Carol Critchfield

Two fond recollections Carol has of the family's years in St. Louis involve music and the movies. Gathering around the piano after supper was a nightly tradition in the Critchfield home. Carol learned to play the violin and Virginia the organ, the latter remaining in Virginia's home years after it had become more of a nostalgic presence than a played instrument.

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 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.

Virginia's professional career begins

The Great Depression,which began with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, and would not abate until the nation at war required full employment, had devastating nationwide effects, worst among them crippling poverty, rampant unemployment, home and farm foreclosures, and prolonged hunger and homelessness. As the economic depression took hold and deepened, Virginia, a young woman of eighteen when the stock market crashed, may have had little choice other than to seek employment and remain at home with her parents once she graduated from Oak Park High School.

Virginia in her late 20s or early 30s

Virginia secured a job as a receptionist and office manager for an ear, nose, and throat specialist, Dr. Jerry Greenwood, in downtown Chicago. Carol pursued a career in commercial art and fashion illustration, taking classes and studying at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Depression, a national emergency of epic proportion, scarred an entire generation and damaged all aspects of American life. As young women just then beginning to define their adult lives, Virginia and Carol found themselves working hard within a frightening national context of near economic collapse. Bread lines, soup kitchens, and public works projects served as temporary steps to help ward off hunger and despair. To be securely employed, as both Virginia and Carol were, was an achievement. They were fortunate, too, in continuing to have an exceptionally close and loving relationship with one another and with their parents.

As a firstborn child spending her earliest years on a remote ranch, Virginia had had to learn self-reliance. With the onset of the Depression, eighteen-year-old Virginia learned that food on the table and a roof to live beneath necessarily superseded loftier dreams and ambitions. Many years later, Virginia's friends would attest to her great love of romance in books, movies, songs, and theater. A romantic temperament would have been difficult to sustain during the decade-long Depression, with economic deprivations that did not ease until Virginia was in her early thirties. For an entire generation of young Americans, to work and be paid for one's work would have to be enough. Loftier goals-even conventional dreams of marriage, a home, and children,were often deferred. Even so, it is tempting to imagine that as her twenties advanced, Virginia might have thought life was passing her by; certainly any private dreams she may have had must have seemed as if they were receding.

Photographs of Virginia around this time portray a young woman with stylishly thinned eyebrows and a bobbed hairstyle, in moderate keeping with the flirtatious, independent "flapper" spirit of the day,an attractive yet pensive woman, smiling a bit ironically as if aware of the gap between the near-glamorous image of a modern young woman and the reality of life as an unmarried medical receptionist in her early thirties still living at home.

Virginia in her early 20s

With the advent of the Great Depression, the flapper image would be replaced by another iconic image: the resourceful, sophisticated maturity of a Katharine Hepburn, a Bette Davis, a Marlene Dietrich, or a Greta Garbo. The economic disaster of 1929 allowed no one the illusion of the exuberant '20s, and Virginia's life, like the lives of her contemporaries, reflected that diminution of gay spirits and independent pleasures. Work had become terrifyingly scarce and the competition for it brutal. Privacy, too, had become a lost luxury as families crowded together and young people like Virginia delayed marriage, muting their natural inclinations toward romance and matrimony because of rampant financial instability. Whole populations of urban single women struggled to survive, but as the '30s merged into the '40s and the Depression began to recede, everything would change with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. World War II began for Americans on December 7, 1941,Virginia's thirtieth birthday,and suddenly the patriotic fervor of wartime, coupled with an urgent need for women in the workforce, ushered in yet another era.

Years later, Virginia would openly claim that her real life began when she met Paul Galvin. As America entered the Second World War, she could scarcely have anticipated or prepared for the great stroke of destiny in 1944 that would lift her out of all that she had known or experienced and plunge her headlong into what she would call "her storybook life."