"Allen was pretty middle class all his life. He was very frugal, almost to the point of being stingy. I mean, right down to how often you flushed the toilet, or how often you took a bath. He watched every penny. So you knew when you got a gift from Allen, it was very treasured. He worked very hard, and I think that came from this factory work and living in a poor town. All of his friends were in the same boat. Everybody was working hard, but it wasn't a bad thing. He didn't know any different. If he hadn't been working as a child, he'd have been home alone with nobody to play with, because all his friends would have been working." -Eileen Dougherty, niece of Allen Chaffey

"Since I saw the Lewis Hine photo, I've gotten more sympathetic towards him, and I think I understand why he behaved the way he did, and why he didn't share his past with me. I think that sometimes we don't recognize that people feel shame about things they don't want anyone to know about. So you get people like my father, this tremendously self-sufficient, very abrasive man, very determined." -Helena Frey, daughter of Walter Omar

According to the caption, Walter was a fish cutter, and Allen helped his mother with the packing. Some of the most alarming of the Lewis Hine photos taken in Eastport depicted children with cut fingers or wielding butcher knives. That was Walter's fate, an obviously risky situation for an eight-year-old boy. It is not known if Allen also became a cutter. However similar their situations might have seemed then, my research reveals that the two boys grew up to experience very different lives.

What difficulties were these children faced with at the cannery? There is considerable disagreement about that. Several years before this photo was taken, there were three serious investigative reports published. On the next page, see portions of these reports. Following that, you will see the stories of these two boys.