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May 1915. Sacramento, California. "Freddie Kafer, a very immature little newsie selling Saturday Evening Posts and newspapers at the entrance to the State Capitol. He did not know his age, nor much of anything else. He was said to be 5 or 6 years old. Nearby I found Jack, who said he was 8 years old, and who was carrying a bag full of Saturday Evening Posts, which weighed nearly half of his own weight. The bag weighed 24 pounds, and he weighed only 55. He carried this bag for several blocks to the [street]car. Said he was taking them home." Photograph and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine. View full size.
If his obit is on this page, he went on to have a wonderful life after he graduated from Princeton in '34!
See http://tinyurl.com/ywdhee !
The time frame works...if he turned 87 in Jan. of '98, he was born in 1911 and would have been 4 at the time of the picture...a little younger than Mr. Hine's estimated 5 or 6.
Little Freddie appears to be wearing a child-size version of carpenter's bib overalls. The slim vertical pocket is to hold a carpenter's flat pencil.
I wonder how high these very young children could count. Probably they rarely if ever had to make change for a purchase. But they would have to trust an adult to settle their accounts and pay them their meager earnings.
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