Kids gone soft? Here's the scoop

Edward Caban is a high-school senior who used to worry only about high-school things. Like graduating. Or scaring up money for a movie with friends.

Now he's getting a crash course in America's economic meltdown.

Remember the story a few weeks back about how nearly 300 people applied to be a minimum-wage, part-time pooper scooper at a dog kennel?

Even the owner couldn't believe it: How is it so many people are dying to get such a grungy job? Isn't the recession supposed to be over?

Edward is the one who got that job. He's now the dog-kennel assistant at Roscoe's Ranch, a 24-kennel outfit north of Woodinville.

He's the survivor of a brutal competition. Applying were everyone from idled construction workers to ex-teachers to struggling freelance photographers to a laid-off financial controller.

"At first I felt a little bad that I got the job when all those other people needed it," Edward says. "But then I thought 'Hey, it's a dog-eat-dog world.' "

Turns out the new pooper scooper's got a sense of humor.

It also turns out he needed the job as badly as anyone, though he's only 18.

See, according to his mother, Ada Caban, Edward is part of what she had thought of as the "spoiled rotten generation." Kids who came of age during decades so fat the kids got soft.

I remember a few years ago — ancient history economically — when we were running stories about how young people had become allergic to manual labor. Farms, for instance, couldn't find any workers other than immigrants.

"He is a good kid, but when I first suggested he get some work so he could earn some spending money, his reaction was, 'No way!' " Ada says.

But then the family's finances fell right along with the country's. They scrimped along OK for a time, Ada says, until her husband, Greg, got laid up with an injury.

The family, which lives in Snohomish County near Maltby, was on the verge of a crisis.

"I would come in and see my parents stressed out, with their heads on the desk in a pile of bills," Edward says.

He realized getting a job was no longer about "extra cash for teenage stuff." It was about keeping the lights on.

He applied at more than 20 places before landing the kennel job. Guy Palumbo, owner of Roscoe's, said he could tell Edward was an "old soul" the minute he walked in for the interview.

"He's carrying a lot of weight on his shoulders," Palumbo says. "More so than the usual teens we get."

Now Edward scoops poop and walks dogs about 20 hours a week, when he's not in class at Monroe High School. He confesses he's not the world's greatest student, getting mostly B's and C's. Still, he's saving to go to college someday.

Every payday, he turns over half his paycheck to his parents. It goes toward the utility bills.

So kids are going from too pampered to work back to being integral cogs in the family budget.

"I wish we would never have had to have him work to support this house," his mother says. "That's our job. Now he's helping us do our job.

"I'm very proud of him. He could have gone out and gotten in trouble. Instead, he got a job."

They keep saying America's Great Recession is over, so I guess we're in the cleanup. The people who trashed the place — the Wall Street traders, bankers like WaMu's Kerry Killinger, the toothless government conspirators, er, watchdogs — are either carrying on as before or floating away on multimillion-dollar parachutes.

Scooping up the mess? That's going to fall to the worker-bees like Edward.

These stories I've been writing about the scramble to become dog-kennel assistant have been dispiriting. They point to a darkening of the once-shiny American dream.

But the kid who got the least-glamorous job to bail out his family gives a little hope. If America's got more 18-year-olds like Edward Caban, despite it all, we'll be just fine.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.