By Greg O’Brien
Special to the BIR

There’s a bit of “Irish” Mickey Ward in John Drew, a scrappy, knock-down brawler when his back is against the wall. The inspiration for the Donny Wahlberg movie “The Fighter” reflects Drew in more ways than one can imagine. “There will never be a day when I can be complacent,” says the president and CEO of Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD), the Boston anti-poverty agency that serves 100,000 low-income, disadvantaged individuals and families, and is now in the gun-sights of Tea Partiers rallying against federal and state expenditures for the needy. “I have to keep on fighting, always with my hands up to ward off the blows, just to keep things going.”

Drew, who later this month will receive the Lyndon Baines Johnson Award for distinguished community service at a national anti-poverty conference in San Francisco, is a work in progress, as he would concede, and so is his agency, staffed with some of the most devoted workers on the planet.

“The bottom line here is to make sure we open every day with good people,” he says. “We try our best to improve lives, save lives, and give direction to the needy, hungry, and homeless. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. That’s not organized religion for me; it’s humanity, and I try to live that.”

Over the years, Drew, a national figure in the community action movement who concedes to being in his early ‘70s, has found himself in the role of the prizefighter who, while throwing lots of punches personally and professionally, also hits the canvas hard numerous times but always bounces back up ready to renew the battle. Drew draws on an innate will to survive, sharpened from his feral days in the 1940’s on the gritty streets of Charlestown where he was born and those of Somerville where he was raised. “Those are my people,” he says of the movie’s caricatures. “Mickey Ward, his sisters and friends could have walked into any part of my childhood and felt at home.”

Home for Drew was a four-and-a half-room flat in a housing project in the Winter Hill section of Somerville where he lived with his parents, five siblings, and aunts and uncles who slept on the floor when they couldn’t find work. “Growing up, I thought I lived with 1,200 people,” he says. His father, John—a fighter himself who left school in the fifth grade, a second-generation Irish American from County Clare whose ancestors fled the potato famine—was a “tough, angry man from the Depression years who worked the graveyard shift six nights a week as a shipper for the Hood Milk company, then drank on Sundays,” Drew adds. “He was a good man; he did his best, but there was a lot of rage swirling inside. You got the back of his hand before you knew what the hell happened. That’s the way it was in those days.”

Drew’s mother, Katherine (Wilcox), of Irish descent, one of 15 children who dropped out of school in the eighth grade, was the family caregiver. Affable and engaging, she entertained the family by stringing popcorn while listening to her favorite radio show while instilling in her children the faith that they could do better. There was always plenty of company around the house. “When I was two years old in a high chair, my aunts and uncles fed me Pablum,” says Drew. “They’d give me a spoonful, and take one for themselves. They were hungry. Food was scarce.”

On the back streets of Broadway, Drew was known as “Jack,” and his friends, the Irish gangs of Winter Hill, fought every day. “I grew up with a pretty scruffy crowd,” he recalls. “A lot of them got in trouble. Some of them went to jail. Some of them died. A few were shot in holdups.

“We didn’t think we were poor because no one had anything, but we all knew we were Irish. If you didn’t feel Irish, you got the [expletive] kicked out of you.”

All Drew wanted from Somerville was a way out. He had the rage and fighting spirit of his father, and the compassion of his mother. It was a combination that ultimately would move him up and out of the pit.

Broadway in Somerville is a long way, a serpentine path from Tremont Street in Boston where Drew’s ABCD office overlooks the Common. Almost a lifer here, Drew oversees numerous ABCD programs and neighborhood centers meant to promote a higher quality of life for people and communities through initiatives like Head Start, fuel assistance, food pantries, early child care, health services, youth development, homeless prevention, career development, and elder services.

Since 1964, when ABCD was designated as Boston’s official anti-poverty agency in the service of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, its critics have cried foul. Early on, the Nixon and Reagan Administrations saw the program as a “give-away program of the 60s,” says Drew of the program that now comprises a network of 1,100 ABCDs lookalikes throughout the country, serving more than 22.7 million people annually. “They just hated us; they detested us.”

The venom still flows; conservatives still seek the cuts. “Every time I turn around, I’m fighting—locally and nationally,” he adds in an interview from his Tremont Street office as he stares at a photo of Johnson. “My God, it’s the story of my life.”

Some of Drew’s old warhorses are gone—among them, US House Speakers John McCormack and Tip O’Neil, Sen. Edward Kennedy and Congressman Joseph Moakley. New recruits are being sought in earnest both from the left and the right for what seems certain to be an Armageddon over the budget. “The level of need is numbing,” says Drew. “It’s under the radar. There are a staggering number of people walking around—children, parents and grandparents—wondering where they are going to get their next meal. We face a crisis today that must be outside the bounds of partisanship.”

Drew, as he has throughout his life, came upon ABCD through a crack in the door. A Bentley trained certified public accountant after earlier work as a milkman with Hood and as a security guard, he was offered a job at ABCD after performing an agency audit during a troubled period.

“How long can you stay?” he was asked.

“For as long as you want,” he replied.

That was 40 years ago and counting.

“Something inside of me has urged me to stay on,” he says, noting he likely could have been a corporate executive or bank president. “Simply put, ABCD gives people breaks. I got breaks in my life, and I want to pass them on.”

As a boy, though, life looked to be a dead end. “I had three paper routes as a kid and worked at Gus’s Pool Hall, setting up candlepins [on the bowling alleys],” says Drew. “I got pretty good at shooting pool, but I hung with a tough crowd. Got into some trouble. Got picked up a few times, but nothing that put me in jail.”

Drew attended rough-and-tumble Northeastern Junior High School in Somerville. “It probably should have been called a reform school,” he says. “There were fist fights every day. In the housing projects at night, everyone drank, and you’d get the back of a hand to the head. So you’d wake up in the morning, wanting to hit someone. That’s just the way it was.”

By his own account, Drew barely graduated from Somerville High. He needed 56 credits, and squeezed by with two gym classes. “They gave me a diploma and said, ‘Please don’t tell anyone where you got it.’”

It wasn’t that Drew was slow; his self-esteem held him back. “I knew I wasn’t stupid; I knew I had an intellect,” he says. “But I thought I wasn’t going anywhere. I felt trapped. So why bother?”

If ever there was an example of “why bother,” it is John Drew.

After high school, he delivered milk in Charlestown, driving a truck and lifting heavy boxes. Then it all broke down: a ruptured disc, a back operation that rendered him to a desk job, and two young kids and a pregnant wife in a housing project, looking for answers. “We had to sell my car because my son needed medical insurance.”

For a guy with no formalized religion, other than his early Mass days at St. Polycarp’s Catholic Church in Somerville (which he rebelled against), Drew had his come-to-Jesus moment at 28. It was survival mode, “a wake-up call I can still hear,” he says.
“All my life I was driven. I had to push for everything and rely solely on my body. Now I had nothing, but I still had the drive.”

At yet another moment of hopelessness in his life, a door cracked opened and opportunity entered in the person of a kindly college dean at Bentley where years earlier Drew had taken two business courses before dropping out. “Here was this hole that someone had opened for me,” he says. With the help of the dean, Drew began taking summer courses while rehabilitating from his operation; he was then admitted into the full-time day program without an entrance exam. “I would have failed it,” he says. “I had never taken an SAT; I wouldn’t have known how to spell it. And yet this dean had faith in me.”

Suddenly, Drew had newfound confidence. “I realized I could make the leap; I could clear the high bar,” he says. “I always thought I was going to be a worker bee, and now I realized I could be queen bee!”

He graduated with high honors after three and a half years of working nights as a security guard, a job that allowed him to study. He was at that point a far cry from the Somerville high school senior who once thumbed his nose at his English teacher, Miss Fitzgerald, refusing to complete a course because “she pissed me off.”

After Bentley, Drew earned an MBA at Suffolk University, followed by a CPA certificate. It was his work for a Boston firm that led to the ABCD opportunity and his rise as a national leader in the non-profit arena.

He is the founder and former president of the National Association for Administrative Excellence, an association that has helped make significant advances in the business management of non-profit agencies. He is also a trainer and consultant who lectures frequently to national audiences in the Community Action Network, and an adjunct professor at local colleges and universities, including the Urban College Program.

Amazing grace, you might call it—for Drew, his first wife, Theresa, now deceased, and ultimately for his six children from two marriages and his seven grandchildren.

Drew’s message that the battle has to be fought again and again has been received. Writing in the New York Times last February, columnist Bob Herbert defended agencies like ABCD against pending budget cuts. “When these kinds of programs are zeroed out, the impact is profound,” he wrote. “Jobs are eliminated and vital services are no longer available. Poverty and its associated cost to governments increase. In terms of budgets, it’s the definition of being penny-wise and pound-foolish.”

Still the battle persists. “This is not over by any stretch,” says Drew. “We could be out of business any day. This is a test of the country—whether we’re going to walk in humanity, or just allow certain political interests to keep the money, and tell the rest of us to go to hell.”

Lace ‘em up. Drew is back in the ring, and he’s feisty today. Asked about his age, he replies, “I’m not going to tell you that. Let’s just say I was born during the Depression, and I watched newsreels of Roosevelt declaring victory. You can do the math.”

Who would argue with that? It is at the end of another long day, and Drew is starting to look like Mickey Ward in the ninth round, showing no signs of giving in. “There is never a day I can figure out how to get out of here and leave,” he says. “There’s always a challenge, and it will continue that way.” His thoughts now turn to Winter Hill.

“Where I come from, you have to be scrappy to survive,” he says. “You fight, if you must; you get knocked down, and you bounce back up again. I don’t know any other way.”

Greg O’Brien is president of Stony Brook Group, a publishing and political consulting/communications strategy company based in Brewster. He is the author/editor of several books, and writes frequently for regional and national publications.