wooden boat: Love of Boats Became Force To Transform Lives Adrift
By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 23, 2006; Page C07
Inside a hot, cluttered warehouse on the Alexandria waterfront one morning last week, 19-year-old Josh Payne was looking for holes in a small wooden boat he had just helped build. A husky blond with a wispy beard, Payne knew carpentry; he learned from his father and an uncle while growing up in Spotsylvania. Now he knows the rudiments of boat-building, thanks to a program sponsored by the Alexandria Seaport Foundation that works to rescue youngsters caught in the malaise of the justice system by teaching them skills they desperately need.
"I learned how to be successful," said Payne, who landed in jail in the fall after deciding that selling drugs was a better way to make money than building houses.
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One of his mentors in that learning process was Paul Weeks II, a 62-year-old Arlington lawyer who was the program's managing director until his death from melanoma May 31.
Weeks, a lifelong basketball player who hit the hardwood with the same verve and focus that he brought to his law practice, was, in some ways, an unlikely participant in a program designed to rescue troubled youngsters, most of them young males.
Granted, he loved boats. He started sailing on Long Island Sound as a teenager, and he and his wife, Pam, kept a sailboat at Annapolis. He discovered the Alexandria Seaport Foundation when he wandered into its floating boathouse-office between Queen and Cameron streets looking for technical help on a wooden boat he was building in his garage.
But Weeks was no social worker, not even a criminal lawyer. Although he was a father, he was not familiar with the personal turmoil that such youngsters as Payne know too well. Educated at Princeton and George Washington universities, he was a corporate lawyer with a background in engineering. For years, his was a high-powered world of corner offices, corporate boardrooms and international travel, first with Communications Satellite Corp. and more recently with ICF Kaiser International.
Then, in 1999, Pam Weeks had hip replacement surgery, and Weeks decided to stay home for a while to help his wife and to take a break from his stressful career. He started spending more time at the foundation and became a board member.
After a few months, Executive Director Joe Youcha persuaded him to come aboard as a consultant and then as part-time managing director. Weeks kept a private law practice, with the idea that maybe he'd get back to big-time lawyering one day, but it wasn't long before part time at the foundation became full time.
"He just loved it here," Pam Weeks said as she sat in the foundation's cluttered, gently swaying second-floor office. "Going back to a regular law job just seemed less and less appealing."
Youcha, 43, a sailor and accomplished boat builder who grew up on the Hudson River north of New York City, took over the foundation in 1992, when its focus was tall sailing ships. Youcha had in mind starting a community boat-building program similar to one in Seattle called the Center for
Wooden Boats.
It was Bill Hunley, a board member and retired chief Navy architect, who suggested that youths should be the focus. The idea was to take high school dropouts in trouble with the law, help them get their General Educational Development diploma and teach them a marketable skill through building boats. The four-month course, relying primarily on volunteers, prepares them for a union job through a partnership with the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America.
"I needed an administrator who would focus on how to run the organization," Youcha said. "We were growing a lot, and we needed to figure out how to manage what we were doing."
Weeks was his man. For nearly six years, Weeks administered the program in every sense of the word -- accounting, fundraising, dealing with lawyers, police and probation officers, whatever was needed to keep things running as smoothly as a well-built wooden skiff.
"He was the glue here," Youcha said. "He was brilliant at being able to take what I had as a feeling, something visceral, and quantify it: 'Here's how we measure it. Here's how we come up with a conclusion.' "
"He knew so many things," said Howell Crim, who directs the apprentice program. "The scope of his knowledge ran from what size hole should I drill for this screw to how do you compensate for wobble in a satellite to how do I volunteer at the foundation."
But there was something more. The big, white-bearded guy got along well with the young men in the program; they enjoyed being around him.
"He helped out a lot of people, especially me," said Alhaji Carew, a slight 19-year-old from Sierra Leone who was a young man in trouble and without a country until Weeks helped sort through the chaos of lost immigration papers that had kept him in limbo.
"He was a real good guy," said Payne, who leaves the program in a couple of weeks to start a new job. "Just a real good guy."
