"I took it to Washington," she says, "when we were trying to prove the Navy Yard was in Portsmouth, because a local person was selected to cut the ribbon on the bridge. I brought it down to [the NH Senator] who was trying to prove it -- I never got it back. When he left, I went down to retrieve it, but his locker was cleaned out and some other senator had taken his place."

Gone.

I checked the Portsmouth Athenaeum. There were at least a hundred archived photos of the bridge construction, but no little Foley. The Portsmouth Public Library had a thick file of newspaper articles on the Memorial Bridge. The Portsmouth Herald misidentified the ribbon-cutter as Helen Dondero. The Newburyport News spelled her name "Aileen," but still no picture. The reference team had already checked the Globe without luck. A dozen magazine articles.

"Have you seen Sherm's film?" someone at the library asked.

And there it was. Sometime back in the mid-1970s an idealistic young library director had discovered a few canisters of 16mm film. One can, Sherm Pridham told me, smelled like a morgue and contained a rotting silver nitrate reel of the Treaty of Portsmouth parade in 1905. Another contained old silent movie clips from the British Pathe News company. Among them was the dedication of the Memorial Bridge in 1923.

"I didn't know it was Eileen at the time," Sherm said. He sent some of the images to the Library of Congress. All of the film was preserved on video copies and sat on library shelves for another couple of decades.

It's pretty fuzzy stuff, but there's the massive middle span of the Memorial Bridge being floated into place. There's a tiny girl with a big pair of sheers surrounded by men holding their hats. Although Eileen Foley's memory of the event is vivid, the film has a memory of its own. A friend of mine ran the short sequence through a snappy digital editing system, then froze a few frames and turned them into computer files. The result, unless someone else comes forward, are the first still images of the moment seen in 75 years. Pulled away from her mother, posing with two governors, the fledgling politician reveals a hint of fear.

Has she seen the films?

"Sherm gave me a copy," the former mayor says, "but I'm not good at putting it in the VCR. I'm afraid I'll hit a button and burn it up."

So here they are, seen for the first time since the era of the silent films. Back before TV, even before radio, Pathe News reached an estimated 3.5 million neighborhood movie-goers every week. By next week the local stations will have the old footage and the new "photo opportunity" at the rededication. After Ellie Foley cuts the ribbon with grandmother, a hoard of pre-1923 cars, trucks and motorcycles are scheduled to cross the bridge in a scene straight out of an old Pathe newsreel. Eileen Foley, who says she has cut hundreds of ribbons in her lengthy political history, has got to get one huge nostalgic kick out of all this.

"I think the history we choose to tell, shows a great deal about the needs we have," Sherm Pridham told me as we waxed philosophical the other day. "We invent our history as we need it, and what a wonderful metaphor this is -- a little child connecting two communities."

That's how potent photographs are. They help people see. That's why it was worth two days to rediscover these blurry images. The insight they provide is crisp.

"When was the last time you saw a community." Sherm continued. "Today people want the Portsmouth facade, but without all the effort. Communities are a lot of work. Like bridges, they take a lot of time to build and maintain. Eileen was always willing to do the work. We need to ask her how to build a community. How did she do it? How can we do it again?"

All that wisdom from a hazy picture of a girl in a melon-colored dress.