Youth Horizons founder wants kids in need to have what he didn't growing up 
Newspaper Article -
BY ROY WENZL The Wichita Eagle & Travis Heying/The Wichita Eagle
Earnest Alexander stands on a new property north of Wichita that was donated to Youth Horizons, an organization for at-risk young boys that Alexander helps run.
Youth Horizons founder wants kids in need to have what he didn’t growing up.
In Selma, Ala., in the early ‘60s, Earnest Alexander grew up with a voice for song and a resentment for being black, poor and fatherless. He thought black skin was a curse; he had no father to talk it through.
African-Americans were lynched and shot and shamed in Alabama. Churches had “Whites only” signs.
One day the fatherless child went to church and saw National Guardsmen standing post with rifles. At the pulpit, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached from inside a circle of guns.
Alexander’s mother had seven kids with several fathers, and she made Alexander change diapers while she cleaned rooms for pennies. He resented sleeping five to a bed. He resented diapers, Selma, white folks and being black. Poverty and blackness and fatherlessness shaped him. He would never marry, never sire a child.
If someone had told him back then that he would co-found a nonprofit organization backed by 45 churches that would mentor thousands of fatherless children, he would not have believed it.
Birth of Youth Horizons
On a cold afternoon last month, Alexander drove his car along a muddy road north of Wichita and told, in his resonant voice, how he started a Bible study group that turned into Youth Horizons, a nonprofit that is trying to create a Wichita version of Boys Town.
He gripped the wheel with big hands, the car sliding on ice melt.
In the early 1980s, after he began to sing gospel around the world, after he made money, Alexander finished a song at Wichita State University’s football stadium one night and stepped off the stage to go home. A white guy he had never seen before came running across the field and threw his arms around Alexander like a brother.
I’m Jeff Wenzel, he said. Wenzel, 10 years younger, was so happy over the singing that he almost hopped up and down.
Filling a void
God sneaks up on us and we don’t notice, Alexander said later. God does things we don’t appreciate. God had cursed Alexander with blackness but blessed him with that voice. After 1979, when he graduated from Friends University with a degree in church music, he sang gospel and rhythm and blues all over the world. He was making $60,000 a year right out of college.
He was no longer poor.
He felt empty, though.
We are never grateful enough, he would say later. God made him black, which he resented; God gave him a voice for song, but the pleasures it brought felt empty.
A year or so before the guy hugged him in the stadium, Alexander, seeking meaning, had created a Bible study class with five or six kids from North High School.
Power of his voice
Wenzel, the kid in the stadium, would not stop talking. He praised Alexander’s singing. He thanked him.
Alexander, after many years, had prayed away his resentment for white people, helped in part by educators who recognized the power of his voice.
White friends paid for his education. Cecil Riney from Friends University treated him like a son.
And God had intervened. One day at a bus stop, when he was 12, he saw people of all races and heard a voice:
“If you can love all of these people, then you can love me. If you can love all of them but one, then you don’t love me.” Alexander vowed to love all people, even whites, who had shamed him and shot King. And so he was no longer prejudiced. And after the money came in, he was no longer prejudiced or poor.
At the stadium, he thanked Wenzel and prepared to walk away. But the guy would not let go, would not stop asking questions. Alexander’s voice to Alexander was a tool. Alexander’s voice to Wenzel was like a trumpet call.
Wenzel wanted to know about him. Over time, Alexander told him about singing, and his beginnings, and the one thing that he felt was significant, the tiny Bible study class for kids at North High.
Wenzel’s face lit up.
He went to North, he said. He wanted in.
Doing more with class
Driving down the ice-melt road, Alexander threw back his head and laughed.
Wenzel, before he had married Reneene and fathered two boys and a girl, had been a charismatic, daring and highly successful chick magnet, he said.
“There is no other way to say it,” Alexander said from behind the wheel.
“Girls loved him so much, he was so good-looking, so charming, and he knew it, too, and guys loved to be around him. They knew that if they hung around, Jeff was going to have more girls than he knew what to do with, and maybe the girls would notice the guys hanging around, and the guys would get Jeff’s crumbs. And that is part of the reason that Bible study class took off the way it did!”
Alexander laughed. God surprises us always, he said. In the beginning, the Bible class grew to 300 members, powered by God, by Alexander’s singing and Wenzel’s chick-magnet grin.
Alexander began to give his singing checks to the Bible class. He sang not for money but for God. So now he was no longer prejudiced or poor or unfulfilled.
In 1986, Wenzel said they should do something else with the class. Something powerful. But what?
Alexander, remembering Selma, said they should mentor fatherless children of all colors and creeds.
Tribute to a friend
North of Wichita, just north of 101st North and Woodlawn, Alexander pulled his car into a driveway, into the 77 acres that Wenzel found years ago and that Youth Horizons now owns. That was the name they chose after they turned the Bible study group into a mentoring organization for fatherless teens.
They both sacrificed; Alexander gave all his singing money to Youth Horizons and drew a small salary. Wenzel quit the job he had taken after college at a manufacturing company, and cut his income in half to run Youth Horizons.
Alexander was the star draw; Wenzel was the manager.
That house north of Wichita is the first of four houses Alexander and Youth Horizons hope to put up with the help of donors. The land cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said, and was bought and donated by Richard and Harriet Kinloch Price. Alexander named it the Kinloch Price Boys Ranch.
The house cost $600,000 and will house eight boys and two house parents.
Kids will come from the juvenile justice system, “children in need of care.”
Alexander got the license from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment; he hopes to open Jan. 14.
He wants to give the boys pony rides and teach them gardening.
Alexander, when he gave a tour inside, noted that Youth Horizons now operates on a budget of $700,000 annually. Not bad for a former Bible study group, he said.
It was muddy outside; he took off his shoes. The house was built and paid for by a donor, Hutton Construction. Alexander noted that the wood paneling is hard, and the Sheet-rock behind it is as hard as stone. The furniture is hard oak, not because Alexander wanted ostentation but because sometimes the lost, orphaned boys become filled with anger and punch the walls and furniture. With oak, he said, you punch it only once.
He showed off the rooms--eight rooms for eight boys. There is a big-screen TV, donated. A library, donated. The kitchen has gaps in the counters for two refrigerators. They will be donated.
Horizons gets hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, Alexander explained, from people in 45 churches, most giving $30 at a time. There are thousands of donors. Mark Hutton, whose company built this house, said the big attraction for so many Wichita donors is that Youth Horizons is locally grown, with no national organization taking a percentage. Above all, he said, the thing that attracted donors was the passion of the two founders.
Alexander pointed outside to the surrounding trees. When they are done raising money and building, there will be three more such houses, sheltering
32 troubled boys. They want to run a Wichita version of Boys Town.
That is the new residential program. But there is also a mentoring program that matches 150 boys and girls of all races with 150 men and women.
Fifteen staff members, including Alexander, find the mentors and arrange their background checks. They all make small salaries, he said. But they make a lot happen with a $700,000 budget. The one regret, he said, is that there are 40 kids without mentors on Youth Horizon’s waiting list.
He smiled. “This is the organization that Jeff Wenzel and I and a lot of other people put together,” he said.
The name of the house he was showing off is the Jeff Wenzel House.
A monument to a friend.
Call from a son
On the way back to Wichita, sliding on the ice melt, Alexander took a call on his cell phone.
“Calm down, son,” he said.
“No, no, don’t do that,” he said. “You’ll be all right.”
“Well, perhaps you should go get the security guard from the mall, and have him drive you around and help look,” he said.
“Calm down, honey,” he said.
Alexander closed his phone. The caller, he said, was from Virginia Beach, Va. --Paul Alexander, a white kid he had adopted. Earnest Alexander, who had resented white people and who had such issues with fatherlessness that he never married, had changed over the years as Youth Horizons grew and took off. He had adopted and fathered three sons; Paul was the youngest.
Paul had been at a mall, he said, stepped outside and thought his car had been stolen.
Minutes later, the phone rang again. It was Paul. The car had not been stolen. Paul had gone out the wrong entrance and had called his father in a panic.
Alexander laughed. He told his son that he loved him, and again called him honey.
Asked how old Paul was and what he did for a living, Alexander replied:
“He’s 21 and is with the U.S. Army.” The guy he had called honey had just served a year in Iraq.
A chick magnet
On the phone, Reneene Wenzel laughed. Yes, she said. It is OK to call her late husband a chick magnet.
“I heard all the stories,” she said. “Jeff stayed friends with everybody, even all his friends from grade school. I met some of the women. One time at a party, after we were married, I heard several of them talking, and I said, ‘OK, that’s it. How many women in this room have NOT kissed my husband?’
There were five women in the room. Only one raised her hand.”
She said Horizons started from nothing and became huge because of God and Alexander’s voice and because her husband, in the early days, was a chick magnet.
In 2003, she said, her husband decided to do something else. He quit Youth Horizons. Nine days later, between jobs, he started getting headaches. Three weeks later, doctors found a brain tumor.
Her voice got shaky. “Sometimes the crying is like a faucet I can’t turn off,” she said.
After Jeff Wenzel’s diagnosis, Alexander and the board of Youth Horizons met and tossed out Wenzel’s resignation, nearly a month old. Alexander and seven of Wenzel’s other friends went out, raised $5,000 apiece in donations from dozens of churches, and put him back on salary. They went out every year, for the four remaining years of Wenzel’s life, and raised his salary, though he could no longer work. Hutton Construction showed up at Wenzel’s home and fixed it up, all new windows, everything. “If you would have known Jeff, you’d know why we did that,” Mark Hutton said.
“I called the Horizons board,” Reneene Wenzel said. “Look, he’s not coming back. They said they didn’t care. They did it to protect me and the kids.”
Jeff Wenzel died in April. His three children were 5, 7 and 9.
His widow went with the kids to an event after his death. Alexander sang.
Her son Joseph, 9, pointed to him. “That’s my Uncle Earnest,” he said.
Another little boy nearby looked at Alexander’s black skin.
“Hey. That’s not your uncle.”
Joseph whirled on him.
“Oh yes he is!”
