How did you become involved in social work?

Herman Melville's Ishmael claimed that a whale ship was his Yale College and his Harvard. My own education in the real world took place at Action, Inc., Gloucester's antipoverty agency, where I applied for a temporary job and stayed for thirty years. The "Action Years," as I call them, proved to be the most important of my life. It was while working at Action that I truly saw the face of poverty, not in Appalachia or in the urban ghettos of America, but in my own hometown. It was also while working at Action that I came finally into myself, into my own identity and being.

I had some glimpses of poverty before Action. I became unexpectedly acquainted with it in Brunswick, Maine after the Verney Mill closed, in 1955, and most of the town's French-Canadian working population had been laid off. As a freshman, I encountered young men in the streets, unemployed and lounging against the storefronts of pizza and submarine sandwich shops, youths scarcely older than my college classmates and I, wearing tight Levis and leather jackets. Combative and edgy, they seemed continually poised to provoke us with taunts about our putative privileges, our money and our advantages — we who were children of the working class ourselves, on scholarship at an upper class institution, where we were looked down upon by students who'd come from boarding school. I ran into their fathers in the town's bars, no less belligerent than their sons toward fraternity "boys" and their mink-coated dates. I knew their mothers and their sisters, who with apprehension answered doors in riverside tenements, where we ventured timidly to canvas for political candidates, apartments warmed only by space heaters or gas-on-gas stoves in whose cluttered rooms and hallways one became suddenly overwhelmed by the fumes of kerosene.

"We don't vote," they'd apologize.

Growing up in Gloucester, I had already met poverty, though I had no name then for the way some of my schoolmates lived in sprawling, rickety apartment houses like "The Beehive" on Centennial Avenue, crowded into a few rooms with parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, as the war raged and most of the men were overseas. Again, the smell of heating oil and unwashed bodies that I would come to know so well as a social worker. I'd also seen poverty in Italy, in the streets and alleys of the San Freddiano neighborhood in Florence, in Roman quarters like Testaccio, or in the bombed-out ruins on the periphery of the city, which Pier Paolo Pasolini had graphically described in novels like Ragazzi di Vita and Una Vita Violenta: beggars in front of churches; boys offering their bodies, Gypsy children dressed in rags, selling trinkets in public markets. I'd even come across destitution in Greece as I traveled on buses, packed into cushionless seats with peasant women carrying chickens or baby goats. I'd seen it in England, too, as I roamed the streets of Manchester and Liverpool. But never, until I went to work at Action, had I experienced the condition first hand or been forced to confront its consequences in family violence, drug abuse, alcoholism and crime. That was the real poverty, I came to understand, not simply the fact that people didn't have money or jobs or decent places to live, but a poverty of the soul, an erasure in so many instances of every trace of human or transcendent sense of the spirit.

I had experienced a lack of money myself, living alone in a room on Main Street after my wife and I separated, trying to manage child support, rent and food on $100 a week. But the difference between me and my clients was that by virtue of my education I had what was then called "earning power," for I soon found two part-time jobs to go along with the full-time social work — teaching humanities one morning a week at Montserrat College of Art, and English as an adjunct instructor in the Evening Division of North Shore Community College. I drove a 1962 VW bug, which I'd paid $200 for, and my rent was $37.50 a month in the studio I shared with my painter friend George Gabin before Jeane moved to Cambridge with the kids and I returned to Vine Street, largely so that I would have a house they could visit on alternate weekends, a house that was familiar to them and which also gave me some peace of mind as I tried to cope with the radical changes in my own life.

At first the agency didn't want to give me the job I'd applied for as "home visitor" in a new research and demonstration program called "Home Start." The thrust of the program, in terms of the new language I was beginning to learn — the jargon of social programs and human service policy planners — was to explore a home-based option for the popular and extremely effective Head Start pre-school programs, which soon became the signature of President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty. The Home Start concept considered the mother to be the primary educator of her children. What the agency hoped to create for the group of mothers who entered the program (there would eventually be a total of 300 families enrolled) with their one- to five-year old children was a base of support that centered on the home visitor, a teacher and resource person, who would visit the family on a regular basis, providing the mother with educational materials, personal and moral support, and parenting skills enhancement. The program would also provide mental health counseling and family therapy for those who needed it, comprehensive health care, nutritional information, further education for mothers who wanted to re-enter the workforce (many were on public assistance), and a steady, helpful, friendly presence in the person of the home visitor for normally young single mothers, who had become isolated as a result of poverty, abuse and abandonment. Most of our client families lived in public housing, which, if more affordable to them, presented its own problems, not the least of which was isolation, as poverty became increasingly ghettoized in the nation.

In reviewing my application for the position of home visitor (as a teacher I thought it would be a perfect job for me, especially with my recent experience of having taught with the other parents at the Cape Ann Cooperative School), the board of directors found me suitable for the agency; but some members, women, I learned, had reservations about hiring a newly single man, who would be entering the homes of what they considered to be vulnerable young women. Wouldn't it be better, they suggested, for me to be given the job of family services coordinator, along with an office of my own, where the mothers could come to me if they wished? On the surface it seemed a good compromise, though I had no experience in social work or counseling and the position paid less than that of a home visitor. The irony, of course, was that, as a "social worker" I'd be thrown into far more intimate situations with the mothers than I would have been as a teacher, for they would be coming to me with a variety of problems and I would be the person to provide them both with referrals and direct services. I would also be the liaison with doctors, therapists, hospitals, school departments, the welfare and public housing offices, and, indeed, often the police and the courts — in effect, with all of the systems in which their lives were enmeshed.

As it turned out, the job was a good fit. I loved the program and its new staff that, like me, had been recruited entirely from the community, based largely on our knowledge of Gloucester and our experience living in the city. For several months we were trained together in the principles of child development and early childhood education by professionals from the Harvard School of Education and other institutions that offered cutting edge approaches to working with parents and children. I was also given training in basic counseling and social work skills. Later, as I took on more responsibilities in the agency, Action paid for social work courses and professional enhancement seminars at the Boston University School of Social work and at several area hospitals that offered intensive training in mental health issues.

As much as I provided referrals and direct services for the families in our program, including trips to the pediatrician for families who had no means of transportation, I also began to advocate for them if they faced eviction, residential health code problems, or issues with public housing. I learned how to deal with the welfare and social security systems, with health insurance providers, skills I had never developed but that were indispensable in helping us to educate our clients about the services and benefits they were entitled to by law and by virtue of their poverty. Empowerment was a term I hadn't encountered before; soon I was discovering what it meant for me as well as our families to begin to feel in charge of one's life in the face of intransigent government or repressive laws. Why hadn't I learned about empowerment while I was opposing the war in Vietnam? Had I been black and in the civil rights movement I'm certain I would have.

There were those in Gloucester who felt threatened by Action or who disliked the agency's presence in the community. City councilors ludicrously insisted that there had been no poverty in Gloucester until Action opened its doors. Indeed, Ken Courtland, a reporter for the Gloucester Times, who had often written disparagingly about the Cape Ann Concerned Citizens during our most active campaigns against the war, taunted me one day for joining the very system he claimed I once opposed. But Action, Inc. was not a government agency by any stretch of the term. Although we received a significant portion of our funding from the federal Office of Economic Opportunity, which was established in 1964 to administer the nation's antipoverty programs, we were a private, non-profit educational and charitable organization, with its own board of directors, consisting equally of members from the public sector, the private sector, and clients of the agency. This tripartite structure was unique to the War on Poverty, allowing maximum feasible participation of the poor in the agency's program planning and the implementation of its policies. Local agencies were not only allowed but encouraged to set their own agendas, so long as they fit under the broad mission of Community Action, which was to advocate on behalf of the poor, while addressing the root causes of poverty in each community.

It was a noble mission, one that has scarcely wavered in the more than forty years of Action's life and the life of Community Action in the nation at large, even in the face of obdurate legislators and the onslaught of an anti-government ideology under Ronald Reagan. And while it may have seemed ironic that an antiwar activist like me, who had railed against the federal government for taking the country into an illegal and unnecessary war, was working in an agency much of whose funding came from that same government (the war in Southeast Asia was still being fought), those of us who became soldiers in the war to liberate the poor (another irony) felt that our mission was part of what government should be doing anyway in its role as intervener of last resort.

For the first time in years I went to work each day feeling good about my job and about myself. My depression lifted, partly through the help of therapy and partly because I believed in what I was doing. I could see daily the results of working with mothers and their children, to empower the mother and help the child with learning and socialization skills. There were mothers, who entered the Home Start program as high school drop-outs on welfare. Today they are teachers with master's degrees or practicing law. Some started their own businesses. Others became social workers themselves or directors of early childhood education programs. And in almost every case, their kids finished school and went on to college. Some who were three years old, when we started the program in 1972, are married today and raising their own families. None of them live in poverty.

Statistics exist to prove the value of Head Start and the Home Start option, which is still offered by many Head Start programs. It's an option that I still feel good about having helped to create, along with fifteen other R&D programs nationwide (for several years, ABT Associates in Cambridge conducted an in-depth evaluation of Home Start, which showed the program to have been both highly beneficial educationally as well as extremely cost-effective). One of the criticisms against some programs was that we were not only giving out birth control information, as part of our educational mission, we were also referring women to family planning services. Our philosophy was to offer our families the broadest range of options so that they could choose freely among those which they most needed to free themselves from the privations of the welfare system. Instead of perpetuating poverty, our mission was to end it. Though we failed to eliminate poverty, and there is a higher percentage of impoverishment in the United States today than when Lyndon Johnson declared war on it, and less money or will to impact it, those of us who spent our lives in Community Action continue to believe that the successes of the program have outweighed its failures.

From 1966 until 2002, the agency's central offices were located in a former elementary school building on 24 Elm Street, in the heart of Gloucester's downtown. Built in 1820, the yellow clapboarded building with Italianate windows had housed the Red Cross after it was closed as the Rogers School. My mother had attended first and second grades in that two-room schoolhouse, in 1915-16, and for a time in her seventies she worked just down the street at the National Marine Fisheries office, in the old telephone company building, while I worked at her old school. Often we'd meet for lunch or I'd drop by her office for a chat on my way back from the post office. I think she was pleased to see me working at the kind of job she was familiar with, rather than stuck at home in a room, writing all day long without much success. I'm certain she was pleased that I was finally earning some money.

For years all the agency's program managers and staff, including the receptionists, secretaries, bookkeepers and community organizers, were crowded into tiny offices on both floors of the old schoolhouse, separated sometimes only by room dividers that were hung from the ceiling by wire. Before the advent of the Xerox machine we used fluid duplicators; and before the agency could afford electric typewriters or computers, before even the advent of the PC, we wrote our reports and composed our correspondence on antique manual typewriters. The furniture consisted of dark green military surplus desks, file cabinets and metal desk chairs of nondescript design. We liked to joke that it had come to us directly from the Philippines, though in actuality we often requisitioned what we needed from the Portsmouth Naval Base. The city of Gloucester had given us the building for one dollar a year in rent, though its upkeep was the agency's responsibility.

Until human services providers were forced into the growing professionalism of the 80s and 90s, we came to work in casual clothes, looking like refugees from the 1960s — blue jeans, work shirts; sandals in summer: the women had long hair mostly, the men, beards or sideburns. And many of us were children of the 60s, or like me, had been politicized then. Young and idealistic, we didn't want to be threatening figures to those we attempted to help, like the women at the local welfare office, who came to work in high heels and nylons — one case worker arriving for home visits in a white Cadillac — so we dressed down and adopted an informal manner with those who came for assistance.

A Neighborhood Youth Corps program provided after school tutoring and part-time work for teens. Jobs 70, a precursor of the CETA employment and training programs, helped out-of-work parents. Head Start was run out of the agency with classrooms in several local church basements, while Home Start was housed in the former Gloucester Daily Times building on Centre Street, where we had offices on the first floor and a day care center with state-of-the art educational materials on the top floor. The agency provided legal assistance to low-income families and home care for elders. There was family day care for working parents with children and an after-school program for school-age kids. Soon after I came to work, in 1972, a volunteer program for retired elders called RSVP would begin, along with programs providing fuel assistance and weatherization to eligible individuals and families. For several years, after the demise of the Gloucester Auto Bus Company, the agency also ran the city's public transportation system, calling into service a fleet of military buses that we painted blue.

But at the heart of the agency were the community development, community organization and advocacy programs. L. Denton Crews was executive director when I first came to work. An ordained minister with years of experience in the civil rights movement, Denton was a bright, articulate manager, who guided Action from its inception, primarily as the grantee for Head Start, to its expansion into a multi-purpose agency addressing a range of community needs. When Denton left to become an aide to Rep. Michael Harrington, in Washington, community organizer Bill Rochford took over as executive director. Bill had a degree in social work from Boston College, and under his direction Action moved in two significant directions, community development and advocacy. Community Development director Dr. Carmine Gorga made a study of the fishing industry with a view to enhancing its sustainability as the city's primary industry. He and the community organizers helped to create the United Fishermen's Wives, a group of women who became fierce advocates for the industry. Carmine also started the first worker-owned business in Gloucester, a small company that made finger foods and other hors d'oeuvres from fresh fish that were flash frozen and distributed nation-wide (I was often recruited to deliver orders to the Wenham Tea House, whose upper class matrons would have blanched to learn that their food came from the hands of poor people). It was at this time that the agency also took over from the city the former Gloucester High School and Central Grammar building on Dale Avenue to develop the community's first private elderly housing complex. Many natives soon found themselves living in rooms in which they'd gone to school.

What was equally important for me and for our mission was what went on behind the doors in that little yellow schoolhouse on Elm Street. For one thing, there was intense discussion — dialogue — that began each morning when those doors opened and continued often far beyond closing time. We talked together about our programs, about the grants we wanted to apply for. We discussed questions of poverty and how we'd address them. All of our program activities were driven by a rigorous planning process, the main document for which was an annual workplan, which laid out exactly what we hoped to achieve with each initiative, how we meant to reach our goals, and how much money and staff participation were required to fulfill our objectives. It was the first time in my life, aside from lesson plans as a high school teacher, that I had ever encountered formal planning. I soon realized that I had a lot to learn about how a significant portion of the world operated.

After three and a half years in the Home Start program, I was briefly laid off when the Office for Child Development in Washington closed the majority of R&D programs. We had hoped to have a permanent program in Gloucester, considering that we received top evaluations from federal and state agencies and evaluators, and that three of us-our director, the education coordinator, and I — had been sent to Arizona and New Mexico, in August of 1972, to help the Navaho Nation establish its own Home Start program, a natural, considering that in their culture mothers were already considered the primary educators of their children. While it was hard to leave an organization in which our staff of twelve had grown close, we gained some solace from having helped to create a program that would live on nationally under the aegis of Head Start.

When Bill Rochford called me back to work in December of 1976, he asked me if I would take over the advocacy program. I was given a rear office on the second floor of the Elm Street building that remained my refuge until I retired twenty-six years later. Like the rooms I've described earlier, my office became a special place for me, not only in which to see clients and work, but also to seclude myself for thinking and writing about work related issues. Settling back into my job after a year of desultory writing and part-time teaching, a year during which I also collected unemployment benefits and felt like one of my former clients, I began to participate in the daily excitement of an agency that had survived an attempt by the Nixon administration to destroy Community Action. Conservative Republicans, adamantly opposed to the War on Poverty, managed in 1973 to force the closing of the Office of Economic Opportunity. However, after friends of Community Action in both parties lobbied strenuously for its continuation, the opponents succeeded only in transferring the Community Action programs to a newly created Community Services Administration, thus preserving pretty much intact the nation's flagship antipoverty programs like Head Start, along with agencies like Action that administered them.

Just when we most needed an attorney to help clients file answers to eviction complaints or to appeal welfare terminations, Marshall Williams appeared. Or rather, his wife, who sat on the advisory board for one of our programs for elders, asked Bill if we could use some legal help. Her husband was a retired lawyer, she explained, and he was looking for something to do. As it turned out, Marshall was both a lawyer and a former Air Force Colonel — he'd been a fighter pilot in the Second World War and Korea and he'd ended his military career in the Judge Advocate General's Corps. Marshall had also served in Vietnam.

At first there was some consternation in the agency about Marshall and me. Bill was well aware of my anti-war activities and he asked me directly if I thought I could work with a veteran of wars that included Vietnam. I told him I was game. At first Marshall came on board as a volunteer. But he proved to be so knowledgeable in the law, so versatile in his experience of dealing with people — we later learned he had often represented men accused of war crimes — that Bill soon offered him a full-time appointment. Marshall and I sat down together and mapped out an advocacy strategy that remains largely in place today.

And we got along. We got along famously. There is a picture of us making a presentation at a board of directors meeting, sometime in the late 1970s. My hair is long and my beard covers the frayed collars of an ancient Brooks Brothers striped shirt. I am wearing a tweed jacket, shiny with age, which I bought for ten dollars at Keezer's used clothing store in Cambridge. Marshall has an expensive if baggy suit on and his hair is cut very short. He is also smoking — Marshall was a chain smoker, who was eventually to die of throat cancer. Half-glasses on nose, he is consulting his notes, written in ballpoint in miniscule calligraphy on one of the yellow legal pads that would become his trademark. I am listening carefully to Marshall. We both look intense, engaged, which was the way we always seemed to people when we were working together.

Marshall was in his early sixties, a native of Maryland and a Princeton graduate with a law degree from the University of Virginia. He'd been in the service for more than thirty years and there was nothing he hadn't seen. From the fire bombing of Dresden and the destruction of the walls of Auschwitz to the bitter winters in Korea or the jungle heat of Vietnam, he'd experienced every horror of war and could talk about what he'd seen and learned with profound understanding. And there was very little we didn't talk about during the hours we spent together at work or after work, including the war in Vietnam, which Marshall admitted he'd always had reservations about.

Marshall prepared his cases so meticulously and argued them so relentlessly that he became the bane of existence of the administrative law judges in Boston, who heard disability appeals, the welfare claims adjudicators, or the magistrates, who sat on eviction cases. More than once he was commended from the bench for his preparation. He won thousands of dollars in retroactive benefits for elderly clients, who'd had their Social Security Disability applications denied or their payments terminated, or mothers on welfare who had wrongfully lost their benefits. Always fair and never judgmental — we often represented people whose histories were checkered — Marshall took on seemingly intractable cases for disabled veterans, who often addressed him as "Sir," some even saluting when they appeared at his office door, though Marshall was the most deferential of people and had long laid aside his military career. He represented women, who had been beaten mercilessly by drug-dealing boyfriends, and little old ladies, who were being evicted from their apartments because they had to make a choice between paying for food and rent or heating oil during severe winters.

I did the intake on all the cases before we were able to hire our intake counselor and associate advocate, Mary Adams. Those who needed legal help were directed to Marshall whose office was next to mine. The rest Mary and I worked with personally, though there were many cases we all shared. Mary and I would find families money for back rent while Marshall drafted their responses to summary complaints for eviction, defending them himself or preparing them to mount their own defenses. Part of our philosophy included a strong self-help provision. Wherever possible we encouraged and trained our clients to represent themselves, arguing their own cases. Most found the experience empowering, even exhilarating, especially if they prevailed, which they often did.

It was during these years that I also became involved in civic affairs, along with my work as a community activist. I was appointed to the Gloucester Historical Commission by Mayor Leo Alper, whose plan to replace the Grand Army of the Republic Hall, a 19th century architectural gem, with a parking lot chairman Greg Gibson and I thwarted. I chaired the Fair Housing Committee, which created the city's first comprehensive housing policy to protect renters whose tenancies were threatened by inequitable raises in rent and encroaching condominium conversion. I served on several task forces for the development of affordable housing; and I became a member, and later chairperson, of an advisory committee appointed by the mayor to oversee the preservation and management of Dogtown Common, 3,000 acres of which had been consolidated and placed under public trust through the joint efforts of then mayor Richard Silva and former mayor Robert "Bob" French, a much-respected environmentalist.

Gradually my life in Gloucester changed, as I opened myself to the challenges offered by advocacy work at Action, writing a weekly column in the paper, political activism and public service, and teaching. The identity crisis that I was clearly suffering from after I returned to Gloucester and during my marriage, accompanied by a crisis of vocation, was reaching resolution, particularly with the help of my job at Action.

The question of who I was and what I would become had dogged me from childhood. Was I Greek or American? Was our family affluent in the eyes of the kids on Perkins Road or poor like them? Should I conceal being a good student so my classmates would like me better, or should I just be my own feisty, inquisitive self? Should I continue spending time with girls, as I enjoyed doing when growing up, or should I force myself to hang out with boys, many of whom seemed insensitive and overly aggressive? Indeed, should I admit disliking sports or open myself to the insults of others when I tried to play ball and did it badly? Truly, was I masculine or feminine?

The questions continued, if often unstated. Would I go to college or would I remain in Gloucester to work after high school like most of my classmates? Once in college, would I be a scholar or a writer? After college, should I stay in America or become an expatriate in Italy? Indeed, after living in Italy, was I an American or had I truly discovered my identity as a European? Coming home, did I want to be a writer or a teacher — a graduate student or an artist? Was I ready to marry and have children or should I remain single? In politics, was I pro- or anti-military, truly radical or merely a liberal with radical yearnings? My despair over this confusion often led me to wonder if, at bottom, I was an authentic or an inauthentic person. The question of who I was and what would become of me continually tormented me.

Underlying these persistent questions was the constant sense of alienation I've written about, the feeling of being an outsider, a misfit and a loner, that complicated any decision I tried to make about the course of my life. Yet after working for several years at Action, publishing my column in the local paper, and teaching at the college, my life seemed to have more purpose and the questions slowly began to resolve themselves. Gradually, I discovered that I could be a writer, a teacher, and a social worker simultaneously. I could also be a parent and a citizen. One role would not take away from or diminish any other. This was a revelation for a person whose sole image of himself for so many years had been that of a single person sitting alone in a room to write.

In retrospect, I suppose it could be said that in bringing the disparate parts of my life together I had discovered a way out of or beyond alienation, a personal solution to my anguish at not belonging. But this did not make living in America any less of an alienating experience. When I was younger I didn't quite know why I felt the way I did; today I can articulate to some degree both the sources and the meaning of my alienation. Even though I can say that I'm put off by a consumer culture, which values material over human life, stressing personal gain instead of the common good, or that I find reprehensible a system, which claims to be a political democracy but in reality doesn't offer economic equality, it still doesn't help me feel any better as an individual. So quite against my will, and in opposition to my deepest need to be alone, I have been forced to enter the arena of civic life. I have been compelled to write about and to argue issues in public, to sit on committees, to take political action. In a word, I've become a citizen.

For this reason I value my isolation and my aloneness even more, though they now seem harder to achieve. Consequently, I walk a line between the public and the private. I'm driven by circumstance and conscience to participate in community life. But the act of participation makes me desperate to return to my privacy. It is a compromise I've struck, and like most compromises, it's an uneasy one. Still, it leaves me free to enjoy enough of the solitude I've come to prize as the very core of my existence and to do the reading and writing, which that solitude makes possible, while also living in the world.

Marshall Williams retired from Action in 1988, leaving the advocacy program bereft, until we hired Ken Riaf, a young attorney, who had also been a fisherman. Ken brought a unique perspective to the agency, as we became more deeply involved with the fishing community, which was then entering the protracted crisis it still faces today, with declining stocks and restrictive federal regulations that have reduced Gloucester's fleet to a shadow of its former greatness. We were also forced to address the deepening housing crisis in the state, as real estate prices rose and landlords were converting apartments into condos, thereby squeezing out low-income families and elders and adding to a burgeoning homeless population. In response to homelessness, the agency joined with Ron Morin, executive director of NUVA, the city's primary substance abuse and mental health agency, and Bill Dugan, executive director of the Gloucester Housing Authority, to create the Cape Ann Coalition for Housing and the Homeless. Ron, Bill and I produced a study of the problem, "Homelessness on Cape Ann," with recommendations for its solution. Two new homeless shelters were created, NUVA's for women with children and Action's for homeless men and women eighteen and over. A number of programs, including counseling, case management and substance abuse treatment, were also initiated to impact the problem, along with recommendations for the creation of more affordable housing.

My last ten years at the agency were years of intense lobbying for funds to implement these programs. In concert with the responsibilities of managing an expanded advocacy and housing program and seeing clients on a daily basis, I also directed the Action Homeless Shelter. We spent hours at city council and planning meetings advocating for the new shelters, and for a soup kitchen and food pantry, which were independently created. New funding regulations from Congress required the adoption of more stringent and sophisticated planning and management tools and an automated information storage and retrieval system, as the agency entered the digital age and we all had to learn how to use computers. Losses in the fishing industry and fluctuations in the economy made it clear to us that Action had to expand our employment and training programs to include those who had been downsized out of jobs or who had lost them in industrial consolidations and takeovers. With the support of Varian, a high-tech consortium whose corporate offices were located in Gloucester, the agency opened a computer training center in downtown Gloucester, at Brown's Mall, the former site of the city's largest department store. Expanding our client base, we trained homeless men and women at the site along with those who had once had well-paying jobs. We added training for medical secretaries and hospital workers, while offering GED and Adult Basic Education courses, including ESL classes for new Hispanic and Brazilian immigrants.

By 2001, when I reached my 64th birthday, it was clear that I was beginning to burn out. The caseload was enormous. There was so much need we could barely stay on top of it. And the landscape of human services had been shifting for some time. It no longer seemed as much fun to go to work each day, confronted, as we were, with the rising animosity of conservative politicians and once compassionate voters toward service agencies and the people we were committed to helping. Constrained also by shrinking government funds and more onerous reporting requirements, agencies found themselves in competition for charitable dollars as a way of ensuring their independence. Some welcomed prominent donors onto their boards, not realizing that their personal agendas might conflict with or undermine the mission of the agency itself; while others held gala fund-raising events that made a spectacle of poverty, exploiting their clients in the process. This new era of self-congratulation and self-aggrandizement made me acutely uncomfortable. I never felt that agencies should blow their own horns or manipulate clients for their own benefit. Long a believer in professional anonymity, especially regarding the confidentiality we owed those who had turned to us in pain and need, it was my deep conviction that we should remain invisible in the community, keeping quiet about our work.

Under Bill's leadership, and with the experience, political savvy, and commitment of Action's veteran program directors — Tim Riley in administration, Gerry Anne Brown at Homecare, Ronna Resnick in Employment and Training, and Elliott Jacobson at Energy — Action charted a cautious passage through these perilous waters, arriving not only safely to port in new headquarters in the former Woolworth building on Main Street, but winning support and funding for innovative youth programs and housing for AIDS patients, while creating public-private partnerships that offered new employment and training opportunities for local residents.

I had already stopped teaching. With the adoption of flex-time policies at the agency, I was able to work four long days, giving me a three-day weekend in which to write. After the publication, in 1992, of Maximus to Gloucester, a collection of the letters and poems of Charles Olson to the editor of the Gloucester Times, which I edited and introduced, a floodgate seemed to open within me and I sat down and wrote three more books. I told Bill and Tim Riley, our deputy director and a close friend at work for twenty-five years, that I would retire on my 65th birthday to devote my time to writing. Together we hired the person who would replace me, a woman with a master's degree in social work and with a great deal of experience in housing. In turn, we hired a new attorney to work with her, also a woman. For nearly a year I worked with the two new staff people to help smooth the transition. On November 15, 2002, after a retirement party generously given in my honor, I left Action with a sense of new expectation but also with great sadness. I knew I was bidding farewell to an important part of my life. Our original headquarters, the old yellow schoolhouse on Elm Street, where my mother had gone to school and I'd had my beloved office for nearly twenty-seven years, was about to be sold by a cash-strapped city — for development, ironically, into luxury condominiums. Had I continued to work, evicted from my office, that loss would have been too much for me to bear.

The next day I sat down and wrote this summing up for my column in North Shore North, a short-lived alternative paper to which I was then contributing:

Suddenly I had as much time as I needed. The dream I'd nurtured all my working days of being my own person, of doing whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to, had become a reality. I was retired. I should have been happy. Instead, I experienced a strange emptiness, a deep sense of loss. It was the first day of the rest of my life and I felt as if I had fallen though a hole.

It was a hole in time, not a black hole, not even a particularly frightening one. Rather, it was a new space I discovered myself inhabiting, one that made me dizzy, dizzy with the possibilities of freedom.

I had gotten up at my usual time, as if I were ready to leave for the office. There was work on my desk at home to attend to. Bills to pay, and letters to write, thanking friends and co-workers for their kindness in helping me make the transition from work to retirement .There were e-mail messages to read and respond to, some having to do with my 65th birthday, which coincided with my retirement.

I was ready to accept retirement. In fact, a year before, I'd planned it down to the day. It was my own choice; no one was forcing it on me. I had long felt that I needed to make a change, to get back to what my former wife, in a letter of congratulation, had called my "real vocation." She spoke of a mutual friend who had "flunked retirement twice." "We expect you to set an example of success," she said.

The truth is I'd had another vocation, not just a job. For thirty years I'd given my life over to helping others and I loved every minute of it. It was a vocation I didn't even know I possessed. But looking back to high school, to my involvement in Glee Club, the National Honor Society and the school paper— not to speak of the fact that I'd been a Junior Rotarian and gone to Boys' State-helped me understand an early commitment to service. Add to that my matriculation at a college whose mission stressed the elevation of the common good over personal gain. How could I not have become a social worker as well as a teacher, vocations that I pursued jointly for many years?

Yet, deep down, the writing was always there. It called to me at night as soon as I got home from the office. It beckoned to me on weekends, while others raked leaves or played ball with their kids. It absorbed my vacations. It was fun, but it could also be a stern taskmaster. Sometimes I wondered if the writing wasn't the voice of my super-ego, the speech of my conscience, breaking through the orderly surface of my days. It was a voice that often kept me awake at night, a voice that disturbed my leisure, one that kept me distant from friends and family.

"Pity the writer's child," my son Ben, a writer himself, wrote in an essay on J. D. Salinger, "for discovering, early on, that parents don't always want their children underfoot, that love is not always returned in the way that it was given, that fictions are sometimes more prevalent than truth, even in the 'safe haven' of the family."

Ben also wrote (in that same essay, published last year in a book called With Love and Squalor), "I'll always remember, too, how my father, an inveterate journal-writer, took his black ring-binder out from its hiding place and sat at the kitchen table, beginning to write about our weekend (or whatever else was on his mind) before the weekend was over, laying claim to our shared experience by writerly prerogative. Does this explain my failure to keep a journal of my own? Or my reverence for the imagination and its ability to change the personal, to transform experience into something else?"

Why else do we write? And here my son has answered the question neatly. And why else do we pursue whichever vocation we choose, or that chooses us? For at heart we are not on this earth primarily to be economic creatures, though we must earn our own bread however it comes to us to earn it. Neither are we in this life to bully or dominate others. We are in this life, this preciously shared space, to give and to love; to do the work we're called to perform, to nurture each other with the gift of our personhood. I don't know what else we live for. I certainly haven't lived for anything else, especially personal gain.

This was my meditation on the day after my retirement. This is what I wrote in that journal Ben remembers, the journal I've faithfully kept since I was in my early twenties. This is how I made the transition, or tried to, from one part of my life to another; from the lived and known to the new and untried. This is how I spent the first day of the rest of my life.

After thirty years, I had hopefully gotten a handle on myself, as the disparate strands of my life appeared finally to have drawn together.

Social work, especially as we practiced it at Action, Inc., Gloucester's antipoverty agency, where I worked for thirty years as director of advocacy and housing, can be seen as opposition to ruling power, indeed as radical activity. It seemed a fitting segue for me, as a former anti-war activist in the 1960s, to have become a social worker in the 1970s, indeed natural to my temperament and my politics. Just as I helped organize opposition to the war in Vietnam, I helped to bring neighbors together to force local government to remedy conditions in their neighborhoods or mothers on welfare to fight iniquities in the welfare system. Our agency empowered citizens to speak out against slum landlords, who withheld heat, or to demand that the city's regulatory agencies enforce health code regulations that made their apartments unsafe for themselves and their children. We provided legal assistance, family counseling and one-on-one assistance to help low-income families overcome poverty. We created education and training programs for fishermen, who were driven from the sea by onerous government regulations; and we helped displaced workers retrain in digital technologies.

Our work was driven by the need for social change and for self-determination on the part of those who felt powerless — to help the disenfranchised to find good jobs and obtain affordable housing, and to make government accountable to those whom it was designated to serve; indeed to change repressive legislation where we could. We didn't win every battle, and not everyone we tried to help overcame poverty; but we forged partnerships between citizens and interest groups and we brought the public and private sectors together in many instances to build new housing or rehabilitate older stock. We helped formerly homeless men and women create their own businesses and we provided services to elders that allowed them to remain in their own homes with dignity rather than entering nursing homes. Perhaps our greatest success was in helping those we worked with to understand the systems in which their lives were enmeshed — how those systems operated, what their internal dynamics were, and how to overcome the enmeshment. And in the process, we ourselves felt a greater liberation.