Edited interview with Eileen Dougherty, niece of Allen Chaffey. Conducted by Joe Manning (JM), on January 2, 2008. Transcribed by Jessica Sleevi and edited by Manning.

JM: You told me that you had seen the picture before. When did that happen, and under what circumstances?

Eileen: There was a display in Eastport over the Fourth of July a few years ago.

JM: Were you surprised?

Eileen: Yes.

JM: Did you know that he would have worked at the cannery at that age?

Eileen: No, he never talked about it. My parents knew, but they hadn't talked about it either. Actually, it was my mum (mother) who told me to go look at the picture. When I saw it, I was quite shocked, because he never spoke of it, but he always was very interested in the factory life. For instance, when I worked as a teenager in the factories, he was very interested that I was doing that. Often I would go to his house for my dinner break and we would talk about my day's work while we ate shrimp sandwiches. He was a special uncle.

JM: He looks awfully young, doesn't he?

Eileen: Yeah, but, you know, his dad drowned when Allen was a boy. He was a sea captain, and his ship was lost at sea. That left just Allen and an older brother, and there was a handicapped aunt that lived with them as well. So I'm sure that his mother had her hands full. She worked, too, but I know she needed help.

JM: How old would Allen have been when his father died?

Eileen: I don't know for sure.

JM: What was his father's name?

Eileen: Guy Carlton Chaffey. We always kind of joked about it, because my dad's name was Guy Carlton Dougherty. He was named after Allen's father, instead of after his real father. My father and Allen were actually half-brothers, because they had different fathers - same mother, different fathers.

JM: But they grew up together?

Eileen: Allen was about 17 when my dad was born. He was really more like a father to him.

JM: So they had a close relationship.

Eileen: Yes, and Allen was very much part of my life also. He was more like a grandfather, because he was a lot older. He and his wife Leona had no children, so they kind of treated my brother and me like grandchildren.

JM: In the caption of the photo, it says, ‘Allen, 9 years old, helps mother pack in Seacoast Canning Company.'

Eileen: She obviously had to work. Allen loved his mother, and I am sure he was happy he could help her.

JM: What do you think about Allen working there at such a young age? Is that something that is well known around Eastport now, that kids were working that young?

Eileen: Well, I guess the older people knew. But nobody thought there was anything wrong with it. I can remember that on my mum's side, she said that when her grandmother would pack fish, she would tie her young child to the table at the fish factory so he wouldn't wander off. So everybody just kind of accepted it. It was just something you did as a family to survive.

JM: Lewis Hine took about 50 photos in Eastport. Some are pretty disturbing. There are several kids with very badly cut fingers from cutting the fish. And some of these kids were six or seven years old. There were two kids who had a big butcher knife in their hand. And there was one of a little girl who was photographed four times. In one of them, she was running back to her house right after she had cut her thumb. It was apparently bleeding profusely, and she looked like she was screaming as she was running. Hine must have just been happening by when he saw what was going on. I don't know whether Allen would have been subjected to similar conditions.

Eileen: Well, if he was packing fish, he would have either used knives or scissors. Since he never talked about it, I don't know what his job was.

JM: Do you know how far he got in school?

Eileen: He went through high school. He didn't go on, but he helped his older brother go through college. And then he helped my brother and me to go through college.

JM: What did Allen do for a living?

Eileen: As a younger adult, he worked on the Quoddy project, in Quoddy village, in Eastport. I think his job was sort of a lecturer. He would lecture on the proposal, and he was quite proud of it. Allen was very smart. And he loved figures and numbers.

JM: Was this some kind of development?

Eileen: Yes. I'm not really sure of all the details of it, but it was like military housing. He wasn't in the military, but they hired civilians. There was an infirmary, and there were barracks and other things out there. (Note: The Quoddy Project was a 1930s federal government project to build dams in order to generate electricity. It was never completed). When I was growing up, he worked at the Western Auto. He was a shop keep. He did that for a lot of years. And he would walk to work, all the way to the other end of the island. He never owned a car. He never had a telephone either. But he had one of the first TV sets in town. When we didn't have one, we used to go up to his house on Sundays and watch the Ed Sullivan Show and Don Messer's Jubilee. He had a sun porch overlooking the bay, and it was really wonderful. That was his favorite perch. He sat and watched all the activity on the water, the boats and ferries. He had binoculars, and he could tell you who had been fishing and how much the catch was. He loved to hunt and fish. We'd go fishing on Sundays, and when the weather was good, we'd go haddock fishing, with hand lines. He'd take us out on a boat. We would fish until we filled a bushel basket. We'd go back, and Mum would have the onions and potatoes cooking for chowder, and we had really fresh fish chowder.

JM: Sounds good.

Eileen: It was good! We had some really happy memories in the boat. Somebody once said, ‘Gee Eileen, you must really know a lot about boats.' And I said, ‘Well you know, it's funny, but I don't. Because my job was to bail and that's all I did when we were out in the boat. I bailed the whole way out and the whole way back. Allen was very tender hearted. Like if we were fishing off the Canadian Islands, we would go behind Campobello and Indian Island, and a lot of times there would be shags or gull nests and things like that. He would always silence me and point, and I would know to look, because he had spotted something, like a baby in a nest, something very tender. He always noticed the little things in life.