No regrets for choosing life of Action
By Alan Lupo, Globe Staff,
Globe North section, 8/8/2002
Peter, the old man, had left Greece at age 9, had come to America, lied about his age, worked in the Lowell mills, worked the Boston streets shining shoes and hawking newspapers, worked much of his life in a Gloucester luncheonette, and told his two sons, ''You know, boys, I'm not in this to make lots of money. I do this to serve the public.''
Peter, the surviving son. nearing 65, thinks a lot about that these days, as he nears retirement from the kind of job that does not make you the sort of cash that now enables younger people to look at Peter's native Gloucester and think - waterfront view, large homes, big buckaroonies. Peter Anastas has been in the business of trying to save people's homes, indeed, save people's lives, his own way of serving the public.
For 30 years, he has worked at Action, Inc., the Gloucester-based antipoverty agency parented in 1965 by Lyndon Baines Johnson's War on Poverty. He has counseled the disconsolate, mediated between landlords and tenants, helped train for work those who thought they never could, and for all this, he makes less than $50,000 a year. His two sons and daughter all make more than he does, he says, laughing.
No regrets, he says. ''Like Jack Kennedy said, you do for your country,'' he says. It's a calling, he says, born of the turmoil he witnessed in the 1960s and early 1970s, the Vietnam War and civil rights protests. You see, he says, he was going to teach. He always loved to write, still does, has written six books, in fact, so he figured teaching was his game. But the times were such, he says, ''that I felt I needed to do more than sit home and write.''
So, in 1972, he applied for a job at Action. They made him a social worker, and five years later, he became the director of advocacy and housing, which means he also runs the homeless shelter and the job training program. Action has a $12 million budget, a staff of 125, and an overhead of only 4 percent. The nonprofit agency's headquarters is in a two-story, yellow wooden building at 24 Elm St. built in 1820. For years, it was the Rogers School. Peter's mother attended first and second grades there. Some things in life come full circle.
Now, he completes a circle of 30 years at a place he calls his family. ''The agency,'' he says, ''has been my life.'' But he wants to write full time, though the mayor already has named him to a committee to create affordable housing in a working-stiff city that is steadily gentrifying. Not only is the 20-bed homeless shelter full every night, he says, ''We see four evictions a week in the Cape Ann area, and those are only the ones we see. Our housing cases increased by over 50 percent last year. Prevention of evictions is our number one goal. Most of the landlords we've known for years, the oldtime Gloucester landlords, family people who are not trying to gouge. But there's a new breed of speculators who will buy a building, evict the tenants, and up the rents. There's tremendous development pressure on us. A lot of people want the fishing industry to die. They're salivating over redeveloping the waterfront. It's a huge fight in Gloucester.''
When Anastas retires Nov. 15, he will leave with the sadness of not having been able to save every soul in need. He remembers the Vietnam War vet, a local boy who came back a drug addict and who could not be prevented from killing himself. ''You learn you can't help everybody,'' he says. It is the same depressing lesson experienced by so many social workers, teachers, cops, doctors. But he leaves also with the joy of ''seeing people getting on with their lives.'' He speaks of women with a couple or more kids whose boyfriends beat them, school dropouts on welfare. They get their high school equivalency, go through employment training, get a job, get off welfare, feel good about themselves. Or the fishermen's daughters who become paralegals. Or the homeless shelter residents learning computers. Or the tenants spared eviction.
It has not been easy for Anastas and his generation of social activists to see the old War on Poverty turned into what they have come over the last 20 years to call ''the war on the poor,'' which embodies what he calls ''a pervasive attitude that if you are poor, it's your own fault.'' But he takes solace in seeing younger people move into that old, yellow, wooden building to work for less pay than they would make in the private sector to fulfill what Jack Kennedy had asked of his generation, to do less for themselves than for the country.
Alan Lupo can be reached at lupo@globe.com.
