Summer jobs provide money, experience

NEWPORT – For many people, their first experience with paid employment comes in the form of summer jobs.

That’s the way it was for Pend Oreille County commissioner and business owner Brian Smiley.

“My earliest job was working with my dad at White’s Boots,” he says. “I was probably 14 or 15.”

In about 1982, he was hired to help move White’s from its downtown Spokane location to its Hillyard location.

“It was a lot of cleaning and loading the pickup,” he says. He remembers making about $3 an hour. “I made enough to buy a saddle for my horse.”

He says he had worked on the farm haying and such, but the White’s job was his first paid by the hour employment.

Restaurants like the Moose Knuckle Barbecue, Burgers and Brew at Priest Lake depends on summer workers. Owner Laura Reeves says she has a staff of about 26 during the summer. She’s open year-round, but it is the summertime rush that carries the business through the slow winter.

She says she has a range of people working, from teens to college students to people in their 50s. She especially likes to hire young workers for their first job.

“I like to employ kids who have never worked before,” Reeves says. They learn to be part of a team of workers, with the responsibility to show up on time and deal with the stress of customer service.

Most of her summer staff returns for multiple years. But it’s not for everybody.

“Sometimes they weed themselves out,” she says.

She says she’s heard some funny reasons for missing work.

“I have to drive into town to get a windshield wiper,” she says as an example. “I ran over my phone, so I couldn’t call you,” is another excuse she’s heard.

The Pend Oreille Public Utility District hires interns each summer. This year there are three working at Box Canyon and seven in the south county. They must be enrolled in post-secondary education. Sometimes they return for several summers, says Shannon Johnston, customer services supervisor for the PUD.

“They get a lot of work experience,” Johnston says. They learn teamwork, how to work with customers and work with several different departments within the PUD.

Lilly Hughes, 21, returned for her fourth year as a summer intern, working in the customer services department under Johnston. The 2022 Newport High School graduate is attending Spokane Falls Community College, where she is studying to be a surgical tech. She likes working at the PUD.

“It’s consistent work,” she says. She says she’s learned a lot by talking with customers and working to solve their problems.

Ty Jenkins, 18, also works in the PUD’s intern program, in the Information Technology department. He’s a recent graduate of Newport High School and Spokane Community College. It’s not his first job, though.

Jenkins got his first summer job at age 16 at Selkirk Ace Hardware in Oldtown. He remembers the first day on that job.

“It was a lot to take in,” he says. He started the PUD job in June, making about $20 an hour.

“I’m around a lot of really smart people,” he says of working in the IT department. “There’s so much to learn.”

He’s about done working for the summer. In two weeks, he heads for the University of West Florida, where he’ll study cyber security. He figures he’s saved about $5,000.

“I tried to save,” he says. “But I have expensive hobbies.”

He says what he learned working for the PUD over the summer will serve him well in the future.

“They were great teachers,” he says. “They really helped prepare me for the next steps.”

Smiley says he learned a lot at White’s Boots. He eventually became a journeyman boot maker. One of the things he learned was time management. While he apprenticed by the hour, by the time he was 18 and a journeyman, he was working building boots as piece work, earning as much as the men who worked at the cement factory Metaline Falls. He got paid for each pair of boots he made, so time was important.

“It really helped me,” he says. “My wife kids me about it, but I know exactly what time it is and how long it takes to do something.”

He has been out of the boot making business for a while now. He is the owner of Smiley Wood Flooring, located in Metaline.

Smiley says he’s employed many relatives since he’s had the business.

“A ton of nieces and nephews have worked for me over the years,” he says.

One of those relatives is his daughter, Meredith, 17. She’s in her second year working at Smiley Wood Flooring, where she works cleaning up and hauling, basically doing what needs to be done. She also has other jobs, including working at a local restaurant and house and dog sitting.

“I’m a workaholic,” she says. She figures between all her jobs she puts in about 40 hours a week. She says she made about $8,000 last year. “I’m saving for a vehicle,” she says. She plans on being an electrical engineer, so she’s saving for school, too.

Teens like Meredith are essential for the north Pend Oreille County restaurant where Meredith works, says the owner, who declined to be named for this story. “You can call me the proprietor,” the restaurant owner says.

The north county has a small labor pool, she says.

“Without the teenage girls, we’d struggle to be open seven days a week,” she says. She says hiring teenagers is complicated but necessary. There are restrictions to hiring minors. For instance, they can’t slice meats, and their hours are limited but they must be paid at least Washington’s minimum wage of $16.66 an hour.

It’s different in Idaho, says Reeves of The Moose Knuckle, with a far lower minimum wage, $7.25 an hour. While there are restrictions for minors about things like cutting meat, she says the minimum wage for tipped workers is even lower, $3.25 an hour. She says she pays $4.25 an hour but servers make about $60 a shift in tips. Bartenders make a similar amount in tips and start at $7.25 an hour. Reeves says she gets many return workers each summer.

Reeves pays $10-$17 an hour for kitchen workers, depending on ability and experience. She says it’s a good place to work.

“We give people a chance,” she says. “And it’s kind of fun.”