11:00 A. M. Monday, May 9th, 1910. Newsies at Skeeter's Branch, Jefferson near Franklin. They were all smoking. Location: St. Louis, Missouri, Lewis Hine.

"All right, Rocky, supposin' I take the money... and I kid myself that it's a means to an end - well it isn't. It never will be. Inside the center my boys would be clean... and outside they'd be surrounded by the same rotten corruption and crime and criminals. Yes, yourself included. Criminals on all sides for my boys to look up to and revere... and respect and admire and imitate. What earthly good is it for me to teach that honesty is the best policy when all around they see that dishonesty is a better policy? That the hoodlum and the gangster is looked up to with the same respect as the successful businessman or the popular hero? You and the Fraziers and the Keefers and all the rest of those rotten politicians you've got in the palm of your hand. Yes, and you've got my boys, too. Whatever I teach them, you... you show me up. You show them the easiest way - the quickest way is with a racket or a gun." -Fr. Jerry Connolly (Pat O'Brien) refusing a dirty money donation to his center for boys from boyhood friend Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney), now a gangster, from the 1938 movie, Angels With Dirty Faces.

In the 1948 movie, Fighting Father Dunne, Pat O'Brien (him again) portrays a real-life hero, Fr. Peter Dunne, a crusading priest who rescued wayward newsboys from the streets of St. Louis and opened a home for them in 1907. The three boys in this photo certainly look like candidates for such a home. But contrary to what most people think, most newsboys in the early 1900s were not orphans or delinquents, and grew up to be productive citizens who led ordinary lives, despite being exposed at an early age to the rough and tumble world of urban life. But many others did not fare well, and I wondered how these smoking urchins turned out.

In December of 2007, I contacted the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about this photograph and several others taken by Hine which showed unidentified newsboys. I requested that the newspaper run the photos and an article about my research, hoping that someone would recognize at least one of the children. On December 30, an article by Matthew Hathaway appeared with the headline: "Author trying to identify old newsboys."

"Little Fattie, Livers and the rest of St. Louis' newsboy gangs are long gone. Though their real names and life stories always were a mystery, their images were part of a national campaign that helped turn the tide against child labor. Now a man from New England, Joe Manning, wants help in identifying these street peddlers, whose pictures were taken in 1910 by muckraking photographer Lewis Wickes Hine. Manning hopes someone here recognizes in these images the face of a grandfather or great-grandfather. It's the first step in telling the stories of these boys' lives, and how they survived a youth spent working the streets - if they survived at all."

The boy called Little Fattie was identified almost immediately by a niece as George Okertich. His story appears on this site. No one identified the boy named Livers. A day after the article was published, a man contacted me about the three Skeeter's Branch boys and said that he thought the boy in the middle was his great-uncle, but further research discounted that possibility. Nearly three years later, on September 20, 2010, I received the following email:

"My mother has asked me to contact you about identifying my great-uncle, Raymond Klose. She thinks he is in one of your photographs. He lived in St. Louis at the turn of the century. I don't know his exact birth date, but she said he would have been the correct age for the boy in the picture."

I replied and asked for more information, and received the following two days later:

"I gave my mother your contact information. Her name is Jean Mercurio. You can call her if you like. The middle boy in the picture of the three boys is Raymond Klose. He was my mom's uncle on her mother's side. I hope I can find some pictures to verify it. He has an interesting life story which I will let my mom tell you. He was kind of a character."

I looked up Raymond Klose in the census, and learned that he was born in 1897, which would have made him about 13 in the photograph. That seemed entirely plausible. Following a conversation with Mrs. Mercurio, she sent me several photos of Raymond, one of him when he was about 20 years old, and another when he was in his early sixties. I thought he looked exactly like the newsboy. My wife agreed.