‘89 Encores : On this last day of the year, and of the 1980s, the View staff pays a return visit to some of the people who made news in 1989. : Building a New Life

For Chuck Teixeira it meant taking a 50% pay cut, but even so, it has been worth it to switch from counseling on Skid Row to becoming a carpenter’s apprentice in Inglewood.

Teixeira, 30, was profiled five months ago as he left his job as a counselor at the Los Angeles Men’s Place after nine years of working with the hungry, the helpless, the homeless on Skid Row.

He was burned out.

“I had been thinking about leaving my work with the homeless for almost a year,” Teixeira says, citing the need to move on because of a lack of energy and enthusiasm for the community he had come to help heal.

That debut was back in 1980, when Teixeira graduated from college with a theology degree and unlimited optimism. But years of witnessing life in its rawest state, of experiencing fewer and fewer tangible successes and being held up at gunpoint, slugged and threatened by the homeless, had shattered his spirit.

“Since basic carpentry has always been a hobby for me, I thought I’d get into that,” he says, adding that while working at the Men’s Place, he had started a vocational furniture refinishing workshop.

These days Teixeira, father of a 3-year-old daughter, is a carpenter’s apprentice at Cabinetsource in Inglewood.

“Sometimes I feel guilty about leaving (Skid Row),” he says, “because I know the need for work with the homeless. But I just think about it and say ‘It’s OK.’ I needed to get away. I was always on edge, on high-alert status, on the pulse of a potential problem. I had to move on.”

Someday, though, he plans to return.

“I see myself coming back and passing on the skills I am learning,” he says. His plans include a vocational carpentry program for the homeless in a shop away from Skid Row, an environment he says is negative.

“On Skid Row you feel negative energy and experience day-in-and-day-out a visual bombardment of pain and suffering. I would like to get people away from that,” he says, pausing for a few seconds. “One day I know I will.”