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BRIGHAM CITY — Eleven-year-old boys don't normally work hard during their summer break. But Sam Davies wanted to go to Boy Scout camp, and his parents told him he would have to earn the money himself.
"My mom wasn't going to let that slide by,” Sam said with a laugh, outside his Brigham City home Friday evening.
He remembers thinking he didn’t know how he was going to make $200 in a month — until he looked around his home, saw an old American flag his family made out of a wooden pallet, and got an idea.
“We already knew how to make them, so why not make more? I decided to make three of them,” Sam said.
He asked his mom to help him put the pallet flags on a Brigham City classifieds webpage.
“I’m really proud of him,” said Brandy Davies, Sam’s mother. “I didn’t think he would step up like he did; but he did, and I couldn’t be more proud of him.”
Sam’s mother helped put the pallet flags on the website, thinking he may not make much but at least he was trying.
"We were hoping for maybe 10 — you know, 10 orders — to maybe cover the bill,” Davies said.
Instead, the family couldn’t believe what happened next.
"After the first 10 minutes, (I got) 50 orders. It was a ton of people,” Sam said.
Those people then started telling other people.
"After that night, it was a hundred and something. We had a lot,” said Sam with a laugh.
(Photo: Mike DeBernardo/KSL-TV)
A friend of the family donated hundreds of pallets. Sam even had to hire his three older sisters and friends to help paint and nail the pallets together.
At $25 a flag, Sam made enough money to go to camp. In fact, so did all the other Boy Scouts and adult leaders in his troop, all because of those orders.
"We lost track, but it's over 200 (flags),” Sam’s mother said. “There were lots of days where he would get done with his homework and just want to play, and we’d tell him ‘you have hundreds of orders and people waiting on you,’ and he would get to work and do it.”
So far, Sam hasn’t splurged on anything with all the leftover money. He’s not sure if he’s going to.
“I had to put a lot in tithing, I put some in my mission, put some in savings, and I kept some,” Sam said.
It was a lot of work, he said, but now that it's done he kind of misses it.
"I got to spend time with my friends, I got to spend time with my family, and I got to have fun most of the time,” he said. “And we got a lot of money.”
