16-Year-Old ‘Kneads’ Little Help to Whip Up a Baking Career

Jeff Cleary comes in to work at 5 a.m. every day and spends the next 12 or 13 hours making fresh bread and pastries in the small bakery he runs.

None of this is unusual for a baker, except that Jeff Cleary is only 16 years old.

A senior who attends Minersville Area High School and who studies food preparation at the South Schuylkill Area Vocational-Technical School in Marlin, Jeff backed into the bakery business while trying to help his sister win a homecoming queen crown.

“My sister was running for football queen, and we were stuck on how to raise money for her,” he said. “My mom asked if I could bake bread for them. I was baking bread every day for almost a month. And then some people asked if I could make sticky buns, so I was making sticky buns too.”

Jeff’s baking went over so well, in fact, that his father got the idea of opening a bakery for him. In October, his parents bought out an established bakery, run by a man in his 80s, located in the former Minersville train station. Jeff was on his way.

That he is able to work all day, every day, is due in part to the technical school’s “co-op program,” through which students are able to work full time in the trade they study. Every few weeks, Jeff takes off his baker’s whites for a co-op meeting at the technical school, and this spring he returns to Minersville Area High School for the rest of the school year.

But until then, he works the routine of a professional baker, mixing and kneading dough and cutting doughnuts. His mother, Shirley, makes the pies he sells, but aside from that, he is on his own.

Jeff shrugs off the suggestion that it is unusual for a high school student to run his own business. He was ready for the challenge, he said, because of the training he received in the technical school’s food preparation program, which covers everything from short-order cooking to washing dishes. But Evan Davis, Jeff’s instructor, gives his student the credit.

“Jeff’s a hard-working individual, and he’s got some natural talent,” Davis said. “For someone his age, I think it’s a tremendous achievement.”