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Old Values for Young Minds
By Betsy Allen
 It's long been said that Loudoun County is a great place to raise a family, and you'll likely get no argument from Jim Wordsworth. The successful businessman has been bringing up young men and women in the area for 29 years, imbuing in them an old-fashioned appreciation for hard work and a sense of integrity - not bad for a family that now includes nearly
4,000 members.
Wordsworth is the owner and founder of J.R.'s Goodtimes, Inc., a longtime institution in the area's hospitality industry. The company's businesses include J.R.'s Festival Lakes in Leesburg, as well as the most time-honored steakhouse in Northern Virginia, J.R.'s Stockyards Inn at Tyson's Corner; Colonial Caterers at the Pavilions of Turkey Run; food service at the Fairfax Hunt Club; and J.R.'s Custom Catering, serving throughout the Metro D.C. area, including events at the White House through many administrations.
At the Festival Lakes location, Wordsworth and his management team have focused on involving young people, training teens as young as 14 to learn the event hosting and catering business. "We've always hired young people," noted Peg Jarman, J.R.'s director of marketing. "You want them to learn the work ethic. They need to be on time and responsible. Every four weeks, we do a review. If they've done a nice job, they get a small increase in their pay."
Festival Lakes, a site for company picnics, reunions and other large events, accommodates parties from 100 to 6,000 people. There are five different picnic sites, as well as areas for volleyball, badminton and horseshoes; softball fields; a swimming lake; a fishing lake; and a wedding lake with a bridge, fountains and a waterfall. An onsite commissary houses large wood-burning ovens and grills, where the employees cook a variety of food items, including J.R.'s beef, a specialty of the company.
Young people are employed in two different areas: grounds and operations (maintaining the property and getting it ready for each day's activities) and food service (preparation, set-up and service, as well as busing tables and trash clean-up. In fact, J.R.'s ranks among the largest private employers of youth in the county. During each Festival Lakes season, which runs from May to the end of September, there are approximately 65 kids on the work roster. Over the years, thousands of young people have gained from Wordsworth's knowledge and sense of values. Many have gone on to impressive professional careers.
 Jim Wordsworth grew up in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where his dad - J.R. Wordsworth, the namesake of Jim's company - ran a meat-packing plant. The plant was the largest employer in the town, and Jim did his own share of toil. "Dad could be a tough guy to work for," Jim said. "But I developed a work ethic."
After a number of years in the field of computers, Wordsworth turned to the hospitality industry. He has always seen it as a high calling - one that requires a consistent level of excellence. "I think it's an honor to be in service to other people," he said. "If someone entrusts you with the preciousness of something like a wedding reception, it's a great honor."
Following his successes in the restaurant and catering realms, Wordsworth bought the Festival Lakes property as a way to ensure the quality of the physical location of an event and hopefully garner repeat business from satisfied customers. "I wanted someplace clean, protected and safe, like a little park we control," he said.
But equally as high on Wordsworth's priority list was the idea of involving young people. He is a longtime champion of youth groups such as the Loudoun County Little League, 4-H and Boy Scouts. He saw in his own operation a prime opportunity to positively affect the young people in the county. "I wanted to create a sense of ability and self-confidence," he said. "If I could develop one gene (in people), it would be a sense of self-esteem. It's the greatest driver you can have."
 Wes Bausserman started with J.R.'s when he was 16, working as a dishwasher at the original Stockyards Restaurant in Fairfax. Bausserman is now Wordsworth's executive assistant. He is a lifelong employee with J.R.'s and remembers well the lessons learned from his boss when he
was a teenager.
"He'd always tell us, 'You see your paycheck now. What you don't see is what you've been learning, what you apply that will help you in the future,'" Bausserman said. "These skills are life skills - teamwork,
responsibility, organization."
Bausserman stresses the company's approach of giving young people as much responsibility as possible. "You train them, but you don't tell them what to do all the time," he said. "Tell them the goals, but let them figure it out on their own. You guide them and keep them on the path."
Wordsworth puts it another way. "It's a good place to fail," he said, noting that everyone learns by making mistakes and teens should have a supportive environment in which to do so. "If you allow them to fail, it's character-building."
David Winter, director of operations, started at the same time as Bausserman and worked for J.R.'s through high school and college. "I never actually left," he said. The year Festival Lakes opened, Winter was given the opportunity to run the operation, and manage the legion of young people to serve it. "I call them my kids, and they have been from the
start," he said.
Early on, there wasn't enough of a teen demographic in Loudoun County to support their needs, Winter explained. It took four or five years to really develop the youth employment initiative, but after that, they hit the ground running. "Now that I'm nearing 50, I have to work hard to relate to the new generation of workers," he said.
 One of Winter's kids, James Harvey, started not long after Festival Lakes opened. He was 18, and helped with food prep and cooking, as well as lifeguard duties for the swimming lake. "Everybody was very helpful. People learned how to get along with each other. You felt that, you're not just doing it to get it done, you're trying to make it the best."
Today, Harvey is a paramedic with Loudoun County. He credits the folks at J.R.'s with giving him a good sense of responsibility and the confidence to take charge in any given situation. Harvey's another one of those guys who never really left the J.R.'s family. "I work around my schedule on weekends," he said. "I provide basic first aid services, do kitchen prep work, get the ovens going, help schedule deliveries." Harvey also has a son in college who has worked for J.R.'s.
Brian Sullivan, a sales rep with Verizon Business Services, is another longtime employee. He started at J.R.'s in 1988, at the age of 14. "There aren't many jobs available for 14-year-olds," he noted. "The people at J.R.'s empowered you to make good decisions. They fostered a relationship with teenagers. They showed you how to get stuff done - very hands on."
Kirsten O'Hara was also 14 when she started at J.R.'s in 1987. "The nice thing about working with David, Wes and Peg was that there were no boundaries in what we could do," she observed. "If we wanted to try it, we could."
Today O'Hara is assistant principal at Round Hill Elementary School, and she credits the years with J.R.'s as a large help in shaping her skills as a school administrator. "They gave us the skills - how to talk to people, how to be a good manager," she said. "The group I was in, there were probably six or seven of us who worked together for 10 or 15 years. It's hard to explain that life. I helped to arrange big parties. If someone had a concern, you learned how to work through that. They taught us simple things. They were your family."
For Jim and his crew, the fine tradition of J.R.'s continues. Their commitment to great food and reasonable prices has secured a long life for the steakhouse, even as other restaurants come and go in the busy Tyson's Corner area. And at Festival Lakes in Leesburg, they're hiring a new generation of young workers. It's company picnic time once again, and J.R.'s is booking and ready to serve!
NOTE: On Wednesday, May 5, from 11:30 a.m. - 2 p.m., J.R.'s Festival Lakes on Fort Evans Road in Leesburg will have their annual Open House for area human resource and decision-making professionals who plan company picnics, team-building activities, weddings and other special events. Our readers in those disciplines are warmly invited to attend and see all the great things the J.R.'s site and team offer. For more information or to RSVP, call their offices at (703)707-8559 (or just RSVP to Marketing@jrsbeef.com). Tell them Talk sent you. |
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Keeping a Steady Pulse in the Community
By Nancy Croft Baker
In recognition of the Loudoun County Chamber of Commerce's 25th annual Valor Awards program last Tuesday, Talk Loudoun proudly recognized some of our everyday fire & rescue heroes willing to put themselves in harm's way for our safety, with a series in our "Behind The Brand" e-zine. This is the final profile in that series.
 Inside the humble brick building in Leesburg that houses the county's oldest rescue station, there is an energy that is unique to Loudoun County Rescue Company 13. It feels like home - largely due to the warm and compassionate leadership of Chief Marie Powell.
Powell, in her second term as chief, is a surrogate mom to some 90 volunteers of all ages and walks of life, including physicians, high-level government officials, teachers, attorneys, students, stay-at-home moms and even career firefighters. She gets a little choked up when she considers the risks her crews take every day, particularly since Company 13 specializes in the most dangerous calls - from major vehicle extrications to trench collapses to water rescues. "I think about some of the stuff our guys have gone through and I worry about them," says Powell, who also works as a career paramedic and firefighter for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority at Dulles Airport. "I'm only 30-something and some of our people are much older than me, but I feel like they're my kids."
She has good reason to worry. Company 13's volunteers and weekday career staff of 12 respond to more than 4,000 calls annually, and the calls are escalating in number and severity. One of its crews, for example, was first on the scene of a horrendous murder-suicide incident in Leesburg last year. And one of the volunteers admits to seeing more auto fatalities than he can count. "On one of our calls, a crew member had to recover a severed arm from the scene of an auto accident and rush it to the hospital where it was reattached to the victim," adds paramedic Francis Rath, who has volunteered at Company 13 for the past 15 years.
It's no surprise that Company 13 responders have received numerous life-saving and Valor Awards over the years for outstanding service and bravery in the midst of great adversity. One recent award was for outstanding emergency medical services provided during the catastrophic fire on Meadowood Court in Leesburg last year and for a miraculous fiery rescue of a passenger trapped in a heavy refrigerator box truck that crashed into a  snow plow on Route 7 during a snow storm a few years ago. Company 13 volunteers also have won three state EMT competitions sponsored by the Virginia Association of Volunteer Rescue Squads for rapid and accurate response.
Yet despite their often nightmarish work, the first responders at Company 13 are surprisingly sensitive, funny and enthusiastic about life on the job. "It's easy for this kind of work to harden you," admits Tami Bredow, an EMT and stay-at-home mother of three. "That's why I decided to volunteer, so that in someone's bad moment I could make things a tiny bit better. In fact, sometimes it's really hard for me to leave my patients at the hospital."
When Powell's crews come off a particularly traumatic call, she will request a debriefing from the county's Critical Incident Stress Management program, but more often than not the crews rely on each other for support. "When you're in the middle of a call you focus on doing what you're trained to do," says Rath, who gave up a private practice in international corporate law to head the Medical Reserve Corps for the Loudoun County Health Department. "It's not until it's all over that it gets difficult. When that happens, my crew sits down and talks about it. We're there for each other like family, especially since most of us have been serving on the same crew together for six years."
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 Company 13's responders treat their patients the same way. "I especially like to follow up on patients we've airlifted," says Glenn Kaupin, a volunteer EMT and firefighter who operates the heavy rescue squad, runs the bike fleet and serves as vice president of the station. "I form a personal bond with my patients and want to know that they're going to get better."
The community's businesses have been equally committed to the work of Company 13, thanks to the efforts of local photographer and volunteer EMT David Galen. "Dave has been fantastic at building partnerships with local businesses," Powell says. He produced a business partner recruitment video featuring representatives from REHAU, Costco and the National Conference Center, who describe their mutually beneficial relationships with Company 13. "The video has helped us better recognize local companies and has helped them recognize the value we provide to their businesses," Powell says.
 Galen also organizes an annual recognition luncheon for business partners and has worked with Powell and others to encourage more business participation on various Company 13 committees. "A volunteer from Middleburg Bank serves on our Finance Committee, and it's really helpful to get that business perspective," Powell admits. "We're emergency responders, after all, not financial managers." Powell also welcomes other nonmedical volunteers to fill administrative positions at Company 13. "We need all the volunteers we can get," she says. "We won't turn anyone away."
Indeed, the station's board of directors understands the needs of its volunteers and has gone out of its way to offer flexible scheduling. "This squad is very accommodating of people's life requirements," Rath notes. The station offers associate and full memberships, with varying minimum requirements, including six-, 12- and 24-hour shifts.
Most people end up volunteering more than their minimum requirements, however. "Sometimes when the clock hits midnight, I'll want to stay just five minutes more, then five minutes more," Bredow says. "It's like an addiction to helping people."
And that's what keeps most volunteers coming back, says Galen. "The county and certain stations offer incentives like free training, tuition reimbursement and a free personal property sticker for your car to attract volunteers. And a lot of the younger folks like the social aspects of the work. But the most important thing to all of us is knowing that you are genuinely helping people and seeing fruits of your labor right away. You know that the medical intervention you provide is saving lives. And nothing is more rewarding than that."
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Talk Loudoun, in concert with the Loudoun Chamber, wishes to recognize the kind supporters of this year's 25th Annual Valor Awards. Thanks for giving to those who give to our community all year long.
Presenting Sponsor: Inova Loudoun Hospital; Foundation Sponsor: Verizon; Guardian Sponsor: State Farm Insurance; The National Conference Center; Heroism Sponsor: John Marshall Bank; Commemorative Sponsor: Dulles Motorcars; Bravery Sponsor: ARGroup; HCA Capital Division; HHMI/Janelia Farms Research Center; MC Dean, Inc.; Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority; Table Sponsors: AOL LLC; Ashby Ponds, Inc.; Cardinal Bank; Dominion; George Washington Univ VA Campus of Science & Technology; Leesburg Police Dept.; Loudoun County Fire & Rescue; Loudoun County Sheriff's Office; Middleburg Bank; NOVEC; Sevila, Saunders, Huddleston & White; Sprint; Stu Plitman/Bryce Resort; Stu Plitman/SunTrust Mortgage; Toth Financial; Town of Leesburg; Town of Purcellville; United Bank; Benefactor Tables: Ashby Ponds; Bean, Kinney & Korman, PC; Belfor USA; Fortessa; Lowers & Associates; ReMax/Ray Repage; The Thomas Simmons Agency Top Banana; Community Supporters: Allstate Insurance/John Bennett; Cartridge World; Caulkins Jewelers; Christopher Howell Harvey; Clyde's Willow Creek Farm ; Concept Marketing, Inc.; Counseling Solutions; D&D Landscaping; Debbi Wilson with Updegrove Combs McDaniel & Wilson, PLC; DeeVinchey & Friends; Eyetopia; Hair Savvy; Interstate Moving & Storage; Leesburg Vintner; Lightfoot Restaurant; Long & Foster/Nancy Pav; Loudoun Exchange & Jewelry Inc.; Robert Caines; Rotary Club of Ashburn; Spanky's Shenanigans; Stockman Title & Escrow Inc.; Terry Mensinger w VFIS; The Business Bank; The Other Kind of Jewelry Store Inc; The Wine Kitchen; Wegman's; Floral Sponsor: Country Way; Media Sponsor: Talk Loudoun - Start Spreadin' Good News; Transportation Sponsor: Reston Limousine; Photography Sponsor: Galen Photography. |
Coming May 19th: Our Fourth Rendezvous Destination
Four to six times per year, Talk will dedicate an entire Rendezvous issue to a related destination getaway within 4 hours of Loudoun County: 4 hours by plane, train, Bolt Bus or car!
Let Us Help:
We're happy to get the word out about any volunteer or fundraising needs your organization has, or information about your special event. Check out the Events/Needs link on Talk's website and follow the listed guidelines, hit Submit and we'll take it from there - that's our promise to you.
Execs & Their Pets:
Know an exec who adores/can't do without his or her pet(s)? Let us know at info@TalkLoudoun.com. |
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