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See full account of how I tracked down the stories of child laborers photographed in Dallas
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| (L-R) Odell McDuffey (6), & Sam Stillman (7), Dallas, TX, Oct. 1913. Photo by Lewis Hine. |
Two six-year old newsboys.
Odell McDuffy, Sam Stillman, Dallas. There are many other of six and seven years selling here. Location: Dallas, Texas, October
1913, Lewis Hine.
"He played for the Panhandle Oil Company, in the
Texas League. He was a pitcher. He had a catcher named Tank Horton. Tank told me that my stepdad was the best knuckleball
pitcher he ever saw in his life. He told me he would walk out on the pitcher's mound before a ballgame and wet his finger
and hold it up, and if that breeze was coming from the catcher toward the pitcher, he would say, ‘The batters are gonna
have a bad night tonight.'" -Lee Riley Welch, stepson of Odell McDuffey
"He was very interested in sports. He loved to go to baseball games especially.
I went to the games with him a lot. He would watch the game, but he had a portable radio, and he would listen to another game
at the same time." -Damie Stillman, son of Sam Stillman
************************** These two
boys were probably standing in a busy downtown section of Dallas, where many of those that walked by relied on reading the
newspaper every day, and had ready change in their pockets. Note the three well-dressed people who have just passed. The lady
on the left is looking back, well aware of the camera. From what little Hine tells us in the caption, he must have asked the
boys how old they were. Apparently, they said nothing else of significance. He would not have known any of what I know now.
Odell had lost his father 18 months earlier
(April 1, 1912), when the family was living on a farm in Fannin County, Texas, near the Oklahoma border. His father's ancestors,
probably Irish, had settled in North Carolina in the early 1800s. For reasons unknown, Odell, his widowed mother, and his
two sisters moved to Dallas.
In stark
contrast, Sam's father, a Jew, had fled Russia in 1907, gone to Bremen, Germany, and then sailed on a boat called the Chemnitz.
He landed in Galveston on August 24, 1907, and settled in Dallas. Almost three years later, Sam, his mother, and his five
siblings also came through Bremen, and sailed on the Hannover, which landed in Galveston on April 28, 1910.
Standing together on a Dallas street on an autumn day in
1913, would the two boys have comprehended the significance of the entirely different routes they had taken to get there,
and the opportunity that America had given them to share that brief moment, despite their differences? Their lives were destined
to take different routes once again, though as we see in the quotes above, each of those routes were to travel through the
world of baseball, the most American of games.
I will start with Odell's story.
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| Odell's parents: John Collins McDuffey & Stella McDuffey, date unk. Photo provided by family. |
Collins Odell McDuffey was born in Ector, Texas,
on January 8, 1907, to John Collins McDuffey and Stella (Truitt) McDuffey. He did not stay in Dallas very long, because in
the 1920 census, he is living in Wichita Falls, Texas, with his mother and a 15-year-old sister, both of whom work as salesladies.
He married Donna Mitchum in 1927. According to the 1930 census, they were living in Wichita Falls with her parents. They had
no children. Odell was a clerk in a grocery store.
Odell and Donna apparently divorced, because in 1935, he married Maedell Cawley, who already had a son from a previous
marriage. They did not have any children of their own. Odell worked most of his life as a tire salesman and dealer. Maedell
died in 1971. Odell died in Wichita Falls on June 17, 1987, at the age of 80.
I found his stepson, Lee Riley Welch, and a great-niece, Kathy Moyers, neither of whom had ever seen the Hine photo.
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