Was this legal back in the day?

When he was 12, Steve Jobs looked up Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard in the Mountain View phonebook (it’s like your phone contact list but in a printed book. Ask your grandmother) and asked him for some spare parts for an electronics project he was working on. Hewlett gave him the parts AND a job that summer at the company. My thought was: Hewlett-Packard employed 12 year olds? lol.