When George was six, the family sold their Waterville house and nursery and moved 130 miles west to the boomtown of Rochester on the Erie Canal. His father, George Washington Eastman wanted to be near the business school at all times. The father made play money for his students so they could learn arithmetic and practice banking, trading, and other business dealings.

Less than two years after the family moved to Rochester, George's father died. It was a very sad time for George, Ellen, Katie, and their mother. George started school and soon he was studying arithmetic, grammar, spelling, reading, and history. After school he played baseball, wrote letters to his uncle in Waterville and his cousins in Ohio. He went to the post office and did other errands for his mother. He went to Scrantom's Lending Library and took out as many adventure stories by the author Oliver Optic as he could carry home.

Oliver Optic wrote 124 adventure books about boys and girls George's age so there was plenty for him to read. (Oliver Optic was the pen name of a school teacher whose real name was Franklin Adams.) The children in the stories had lots of action-packed adventures on boats and trains and chasing criminals. They helped poor people and sick people and runaway slaves. They worked hard and earned money sot they could travel.

George was always busy building or inventing something. He went through the junk pile outside the Bausch and Lomb Optical factory and took home some hard rubber rings left over from the glasses the factory made. He used them to make finger rings for his friends. He took knitting needles and bent them into wire puzzles. When his mother wanted a coffee filter, he took some cotton and put it in a sieve. That kept the coffee grounds from getting into the cup. When his sister Ellen wanted bookshelves, he made them with tools his mother gaves him for Christmas. When Katie wanted a picture framed, he made the frame. When she wanted a checkerboard, he made that.

In 1865 when George was 11, a terrible flood of the Genesee River almost washed Rochester away. All of the streets were flooded. George found it fun to take a piece of boardwalk and with a broom as a paddle, paddle around the streets of Rochester.

Two years later when he was 13, George decided to take a job as a messenger boy to help support the family. His mother was sorry to see him quit school but he never stopped learning. He stood around in Steele and Avery's book store and read the encyclopedias until clerk Tommy Brown coughed to let him know that he was not a paying customer. Sometimes he bought a French or German grammar book in hopes of learning to read and write those languages on his own. And he never stopped lugging home armsful of Oliver Optic books from Scrantoms.

During summer vacations he bought train tickets so that he could visit realtives. He took the train to Waterville to visit Uncle Horace Eastman and his cousin Almon Eastman. He went to Ohio to stay with cousins Mary and Caroline Eastman and to Marcellus, New York to play with Kib Tompkins, another cousin. Sometimes he just went to a nearby lake and spent the weekend fishing.

The Powers building in downtown Rochester had the first elevator in western New York State. George and his friends paid a dime to ride it to the roof where they hoped they could see all the way to Lake Ontario. They couldn't, but maybe that was because it was foggy that day.

George joined the Rochester Bicycle Club. Weekends he biked or took the trolley to Lake Ontario where there were carousels, horseraces, and other amusements. There were many hotels on the lake with boardwalks for walking, a pier for boating and fishing, and a beach for swimming. Weekends he played catcher for a champion semi-professional baseball team.

Horatio Alger could have plotted Eastman’s life. He was only seven when his brilliant but profligate father died. At thirteen, he dropped school and went to work to help support the family—his mother, Maria Kilbourn Eastman and two older sisters, Ellen, who would marry and have his only niece and nephew. And Katie, who had contracted infantile paralysis at age one and would die at twenty. (In the 1920s, Eastman provided Franklin Roosevelt with cameras to record to progress of polio victims at Warm Springs while never mentioning that his sister suffered from polio.)

Eastman rose quickly from office boy to a good job with a bank.