Steve Jobs likes to tell how his own career in computers was shaped by a lucky summer job. Fascinated by electronics and already brash at age 13, he looked up Bill Hewlett, of Hewlett Packard, in the Palo Alto telephone book and called him. They talked shop, and the boy ended up putting in screws on an HP assembly line. His first day, he later said, was "bliss."

It is an archetypal American story, the summer job that helps a teenager save for a car, clothes or college, that provides a first taste of the workaday world and sometimes even a crucial steppingstone.

But the venerable rite is also an endangered one: Between a historic decline in short-term jobs for teenagers and the listing economy, only one in four youths ages 16 to 19 is expected to find work this summer, made more difficult for low-income teens by shrinking federal job subsidies. In 2000, by comparison, 45 percent of teenagers worked.

A ray of hope: City groups like the Boston Private Industry Council are persuading hospitals, banks and ballparks to give paying work and invaluable experience to high school students — one of whom just might be a future Apple chief executive.

— ERIK ECKHOLM

PRESSURE GROWS OVER JOB SEARCH AS THE SCHOOL YEAR WINDS DOWN

LOS ANGELES — Crystal Casciano had tickets to the Los Angeles Sparks WNBA game. But to get there, she needed money to fill her car’s gas tank.

Sitting on the sofa with her family after school, she asked her mother for some cash. "Just five dollars, to eat," she said.

Casciano, 17, and her two brothers are looking for summer work — so far without any luck. The youth employment program that helped them find jobs at a summer camp last year has lost its financing; calls to local camps have proved fruitless; and her younger brother’s trip to the mall, where he filled out a dozen job applications, has not yielded a single interview.

Casciano is just two weeks shy of her high school graduation and most classes are over, but the emaciated job market has stranded her inside her house. It is a plight all too familiar for teenagers in her San Fernando Valley neighborhood, northwest of downtown Los Angeles; none of her friends can find work, either.

"I worry it’s going to be like this all summer, just sitting here bored with nothing to do but text or go on the computer," she said. "I want to find a job, so I’ll actually have the freedom to go places."

Her boredom has become a source of concern for her mother, Irma Alberto, the family’s lone breadwinner. Her older son, 23, has been unemployed for more than a year, and Alberto worries about keeping her children motivated.

"Crystal is a very active person, and I can see her enthusiasm going away now that she’s not in school all the time," Alberto said nervously. "I worry that if she doesn’t find something else, she’ll start falling through the cracks. That’s what happened with her brother."

Last summer, working as a counselor and bringing home several hundred dollars every week, Casciano took pride in helping ease the financial burden on her mom. She bought her own school clothes, paid for her basketball team gear and supplied her own spending money.

And she enjoyed working with younger children. "I got really attached to them," she said. "I think I want to teach elementary school."

In the fall, she will start studying to be a teacher at nearby California State University, Northridge.

Her mother has taken a personal leave from her accountant job to help her children find work, calling camps for Crystal, driving her son to the mall and pressing them to keep looking.

Trying to encourage Crystal, Alberto turned down a second request for money.

"I feel like I need to guide my kids somewhere, need to put them back on track," she said. "It’s tough to motivate them because they know mom is going to help them out."

Casciano hoped her friends would buy her gas and a soft drink at the game. Some of their parents would probably give them cash.

"They understand," she said. "I help them out when I have a little money."

— IAN LOVETT

DREAMING OF CENTER STAGE, BUT THE GIFT SHOP IS ALREADY A SECOND STEP

CENTRAL CITY, Colo. — Selling hardware in small-town Minnesota might not be the traditional route to an operatic career. And selling mugs and T-shirts in an opera house gift shop is also at least several steps removed from Laura Pancoast’s dream of life on the stage — and of tragic death each night as a doomed, love-besotted soprano.

But in an unlikely plot twist that Puccini himself might have smiled upon, it was Pancoast’s high school experience selling hammers and pruning saws at Hardware Hank in Thief River Falls, Minn. — and not her voice — that turned the key in landing her a summer job here at the Central City Opera.

Where at least 300 applicants for the 14 positions failed — including a good friend who offered important, hard-won counsel — Pancoast, 19, got through.

And so for now, close to the action is close enough for victory.

"I just wanted to be out in an opera company," she said on a recent morning as she prepared the shop for opening. Central City’s repertory season begins June 25 with Bizet’s "Carmen." "And I get to be with the singers and meet them. They’re very approachable."

A spirit of practicality seems embedded in Central City’s 550-seat opera house, as pervasive as the smell of old wood and greasepaint. Built in 1878 in a gold rush boom, it held on through the bust, resuming performances in 1932 during the Great Depression.

A tradition of dependence on young, starry-eyed interns goes back to those tough early days, said Karen T. Federing, the festival production manager, who grilled Pancoast for 90 minutes in an Internet video interview before offering her the job. Federing asked about Hardware Hank, but also about Pancoast’s 10-year life plan.

"They are a core part of how we do what we do," Federing said. "And they get a real front-row seat of how an arts organization puts together a season."

Interns, in addition to their set duties in wardrobe, props or the gift shop, also water flowers, clean up and usher at the performances. For all this, they get $275 a week, free group housing and a travel stipend to get to Central City, about an hour west of Denver, 8,000 feet in the Rockies.

Pancoast, a vocal performance major at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., said she partly owed her spot to a friend and fellow singer at Concordia who applied last year and failed. The friend’s advice: Emphasize your experience in things the company needs.

"I didn’t know stage management or anything like that, but I figured, small-town gift shop, small-town hardware store," she said with a shrug.

In other words, reach big, dream big, but realize the world does not run on talent alone.

That sensible spirit also animates her longer-term view.

She has decided to go after a Ph.D. in vocal performance, not because that will automatically open a curtain at the Metropolitan Opera in New York or La Scala in Milan — or Central City for that matter — but because it could help land her a teaching gig at a university. In the ferociously competitive, unpredictable arts world, she said, a stable day job, glamorous or not, could make all the difference.

— KIRK JOHNSON

TURNING TO A CITY PROGRAM AFTER AN EARLIER SEARCH PROVED FRUITLESS

BOSTON — Every time Jocelyn Herrera Lazo stepped into a store, she tried to apply for a summer job.

"Stop and Shop, Hollister, Best Buy, Old Navy," Lazo, 18, counted them off. No one was hiring. Her friends have had similar experiences. "It’s frustrating because you want to do something, but you can’t."

Discouraged and in need of work experience and money for college at Westfield State University in the fall, Lazo finally visited the Boston Private Industry Council, a private-public partnership that has an office in her high school. The council acts as a broker between high school job applicants and employers. The organization placed 1,400 city teenagers into paying jobs last summer.

"If you’re over 30, you remember your summer job and the jobs your friends had," said Neil Sullivan, the executive director of the council. "If you’re under 30, somebody had a summer job and maybe it was you. There’s been a huge shift in the labor market."

But Lazo was among the lucky ones. She landed work at what many here consider to be the holy grail of summer offices: Fenway Park.

"I’m a Red Sox fan," Lazo said. "I might as well see behind the scenes at Fenway."

She works in concessions, helping prep the thousands of Fenway Franks, hamburgers, chicken tenders and, on cold days, cups of clam chowder sold at Fenway each game.

She arrives at 4 p.m. and starts stocking bottles of soda or opening buns for cooks.

As fans start trickling into the stadium, Lazo moves out a bit from behind the scenes, stocking a self-serve hot dog station and fielding requests from cashiers for bags of peanuts and Cracker Jack.

Fans are almost always friendly, Lazo said, although things can get a little tense when the New York Yankees are in town: People really get depressed when the team is losing to the Yankees.

"That’s the worst," she said.

Lazo, who just graduated from Monument High School in South Boston as the salutatorian of her class, makes $67 a game and plans to work all the home games she can until school starts, as well as a New Kids on the Block and Backstreet Boys concert Saturday. "I do personally like to work here, because it’s so cool to be in this environment," Lazo said.

Sadly, her experience has been behind the scenes. Lazo can tell by the roar or groan of the crowd exactly what is happening outside, but there is one thing she has never done at Fenway: watch a baseball game.

— KATIE ZEZIMA

TO GET HIS JOB, HE JUST WORKED UNTIL SOMEBODY NOTICED

ATLANTA — Some teenagers search for jobs by asking their parents’ friends. Others submit resume after resume online. And then there is Cameron Stephens’s approach: Work until they pay you.

Stephens, 17, a shy high school student in Atlanta, just started showing up at the job he wanted — at a local farmers’ market. He had never picked a vegetable, having always lived within city limits. He did not know what "organic" meant. But he drove by the weekly East Atlanta Village Farmers Market last summer and thought it "seemed like a cool place to work."

Instead of applying for a job, he took a bold strategy: He just started doing the work, without most farmers even knowing who he was. For two weeks, he set up tents, unloaded tomatoes and onions and shrugged off questions about what he was doing, until a supervisor confronted him.

"Finally, I just asked him, ‘Do you want a job here or what?"’ recalled Judith Winfrey, an owner of Love is Love Farm, a small vegetable farm in Atlanta.

That led to more jobs. This summer, though nearly all of his classmates are unemployed, Stephens is working at two weekly farmers’ markets, planting vegetables at Winfrey’s farm and busing tables at a restaurant.

The work is sometimes degrading — he has dressed in full-body costumes as a tomato, a strawberry and a carrot to advertise the market. And it is always hot: 90 degrees is a moderate day here in the summer.

But he has earned enough money — $60 a day — to buy himself a television, a laptop computer and a bright yellow motor scooter that he drives to his jobs. His advice to less fortunate job-seeking teens? Find a mentor.

"Once I found Judith, she just told people about me and I got work at other farmers’ markets," he said. "Now I have four jobs."

Farming may be a trendy gig. But for Stephens, a self-described pizza and fried chicken kind of guy, it was as foreign as being an astronaut. The farm-to-table purists gave him grief for bringing a box of Popeye’s to the market. And it took weeks before he could distinguish kale from kohlrabi, let alone eat either.

"It makes you appreciate where food comes from," he said, having recently been given fresh bacon and cheese croissants, boiled Georgia peanuts and milk and honey ice cream.

He is treated like a beloved younger brother at the market, a weekly gathering of two dozen produce vendors. He is razzed for being so shy but praised for his hard work and punctuality. He is saving his wages to buy a motor scooter for his mother, who is a single parent.

"Most friends are sitting around the house, going to the mall, getting money from their parents," Stephens said. "Sometimes I’m burning up in that carrot costume. But I just like having a job."

— ROBBIE BROWN

© 2011 The New York Times Company