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flour mills, steamboats and trains. But they’d bickered between themselves, made comments to him about angles and such, and he was about to suggest they reschedule when they were more certain of what they wanted to convey when they suddenly sat, stared into the camera, and said they were ready indeed. They had just gone out the back way when he looked at his watch. He clipped the clock casing shut as the bell rang. Well, at least his interviewees were prompt. This was encouraging. He opened the door expecting to see two young women, perhaps even wives, seeking work to supplement their husbands’ meager pay.
    Why, they’re just girls , he thought. Children . One so small she was not much taller than his Russell. He frowned. She carried a camera case that nearly outweighed her. Just the thing he’d hoped to avoid: a camera girl, someone who thought she knew photography. She also happened to have a sparkle of strength in her eyes that suggested she’d not be easily trained.
    It was not what he’d hoped for, but then, life never was.
    The one was much too small. She probably couldn’t manage his large cameras. But if she could learn developing, if she had an eye for such, well, maybe she could perform. If she’d take direction. She reminded him of his wife years before: warm eyes, full lips that turned up slightly as though she was always ready to smile.
    The other girl was husky. She’d carry cameras without trouble. But she had dull eyes. FJ always looked at the eyes. The taller of the two would be slow, he ventured, but dutiful. The small one’s gray eyes with flecks of gold and blue held a snap to them. Too bold perhaps, wearing her bare arms exposed beneath a shawl and looking at him with curiosity, he thought. Her eyes looked as though a laugh might bubble through them. So young.
    He’d been young too when he began. At thirteen he was apprenticed in carpentry, and by age sixteen immigrated to America from Kirchheim, Germany, arriving with the clothes on his back, a fifty-cent piece in his watch pocket, and a straw hat, the rest having been lost when the ship was disabled and the trunks lost at sea. The wind took his hat at the dock in New York.
    A great-uncle who waited for him in Buffalo promised five dollars a day—top wages indeed in 1882—working at his icebox-building factory next door to his great-uncle’s tannery. FJ had hated the smells and, worse, his having to dress for dinner and listen to people chatter on around him in English, of which he understood not a word. He didn’t know then that his great-uncle Jacob Schollkopf had founded Niagara Falls Power Company, a bank, breweries, and other businesses he might have worked into. The constant pressure of his having to “perform” for his great-uncle, plus the pressure from workers who suggested he didn’t earn his wages but was granted into them, made him leave the safety and promise of his family.
    He found another job building furniture and worked to pay back his passage costs. He taught himself English, then joined the National Guard by changing his name from Gottlieb Friedrich Bauer to Frederick John Bauer and making himself a few years older. He’d made his way in America, but sometimes he missed what other boys were able to do: play ball in the streets, learn to ice skate, go on hayrides. His life was always about work.
    Now here before him were young girls likely bound on the same path as he had been: working, working. It was too bad. He wanted more for his own children, wanted them to have privilege, not so they assumed it was their right, but so they’d have a childhood, a time of joy and laughter, even if he hadn’t had much of that himself.
    Well, he’d see what these young ladies had to say. He’d discover whether they’d be the type to leave when challenges arrived or stay until the job was finished.

    Jessie decided that Mr. Bauer asked dull questions, though she tried to answer them politely while her eyes scanned the