Children’s Rights Leader Sees His Painful Past in Clients

Before he graduated from Harvard Law, studied European intellectual history or moved into a 19th-floor office with a panoramic view of the city, Andrew Bridge was a latchkey child.

Except that 5-year-old Andrew didn’t have a key. And except that his mother was forced into prostitution and often didn’t turn up until 11 p.m.

So night after night, Andrew would sit crying on a busy North Hollywood street. No one, he said, ever stopped.

But six weeks ago, Andrew Bridge, now 33, became executive director of the Alliance for Children’s Rights--the county’s only organization that provides legal services exclusively for children.

For Bridge--whose appearance and impressive resume might lead strangers to suppose he’s had a privileged past--it has been a long, strange trip. Both his parents did stints in state prison. He grew up in the county’s foster-care system and graduated from one of the country’s top law schools.

Now he leads a private agency charged with serving youngsters in a county where 70,000 are either in the foster-care system or remain at home under county supervision.

Many of those children, said Bridge, are expected to achieve little and are often dumped out, unprepared, on their 18th birthdays.

“The biggest underlying problem in foster care is the complete lack of expectation [that people have for children],” he said. “They are not supposed to be normal kids. No one thinks they will go to college. It’s completely unacceptable.”

His experiences, Bridge said, have led him to place a greater emphasis on children’s decisions than the choices made by adults.

“A 6-year-old in foster care has the same legal rights as IBM or General Motors do when they hire a lawyer,” he said. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen, largely because lawyers have caseloads in the hundreds. What we do is represent kids and talk to them, find out what they want.”

Though Bridge has not yet had a chance to put his stamp on the 4-year-old nonprofit organization, he is praised by colleagues for his energy and range of experience.

“He is extremely knowledgeable, has a substantial legal background, plus he has that experience of growing up in that system,” said Peter Digre, head of the county’s Department of Children and Family Services and one of the most respected administrators in the field. “It will be interesting to see where he takes the organization.”

The alliance, with a $750,000 annual budget, nine paid staff members and half a dozen volunteer attorneys, has represented about 5,700 children since it was started in 1992.

Nearly all its legal work is performed by law firms who represent the group’s clients for free. Most of its cases come through children’s dependency courts--and the group works on issues that range from foster-care placements to writing wills for children’s caregivers who are dying of AIDS.

In dependency court, children are represented by county-funded attorneys, usually from the Department of Children’s Legal Services. Because those attorneys have caseloads of as many as 200 children, Bridge’s group helps with many cases.

About 100 law firms donated 450 attorneys to the alliance last year for a total of 10,136 pro bono hours. The firms that donate the most attorneys are Latham & Watkins; Manatt, Phelps & Philips; and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

Bridge said the group’s policy of representing children only--as opposed to also working for parents--allows it to focus on what the child wants.

He said his primary goals for the alliance are to handle more cases and get more involved in cases related to children’s mental health needs.

The slightly built, cleanshaven Bridge appears younger than his years, a trait he says helps in dealing with children.

“I think it makes it easier for kids to trust me, because it makes me look less of an intimidating adult lawyer,” he said.

It also helps that Bridge made it through some of the same things his clients are dealing with.

His account of that journey follows. He declined to give the names of his mother, father and others to protect their privacy.

“I was told that when I was a baby, my mom and dad decided to celebrate my birth, so they went on this kind of a spree across the country writing bad checks to pay for it,” he said.

When the family reached California, both parents were arrested and sentenced to state prison terms.

His 18-year-old mother did two years, his 20-year-old father received a stiffer sentence.

Andrew, who was sent back to Chicago to his grandmother’s house, hasn’t seen his father since but believes he is no longer in prison.

When his mother was released, she telephoned Andrew’s grandmother, told her that she had gone straight, enrolled in beautician school in North Hollywood and wanted her son back.

So 5-year-old Andrew was put alone on a plane to Los Angeles because his grandmother couldn’t afford her own fare.

It wasn’t the last time he was left to care for himself. Once he got to North Hollywood, Andrew’s mother was frequently not at home when he returned from school, nor was she at the beauty shop.

So he would sit on Lankershim Boulevard, waiting and crying.

Bridge said he later found out his mother had been forced to prostitute herself at times, and that the men she would sometimes bring home were not boyfriends, but customers.

Bridge also said he did not know his mother was addicted to pills and that she had “a disability” he believes might have led to the nights she apparently forgot him.

But instead of getting angry, the 5-year-old became fiercely protective of his mother. “I felt an enormous necessity to protect my mom,” he said. “Even then, before we got money, I would take it from her or she would spend it.”

Indeed, Bridge is still protective of his mother, whom he refuses to blame, and whose illness he refuses to specify lest it embarrass her. She lives in a halfway house in Arizona.

“For all her absolute inability to physically care for me, leaving me on the street, with not enough food and everything else, she never made me doubt that she loved me,” he said. One day near Christmas, 6-year-old Andrew watched his mother get arrested while shoplifting his present. It was, he remembers, “a little rubber green man.”

By that time, the family had been kicked out of their apartment as well as several seedy motels. On occasion, they lived on the street--a rare sight, even in Los Angeles, he said, during the early 1970s.

He had stopped attending school regularly, and remembers one Saturday getting picked up by police and taken to a social worker.

“I was getting tired of it,” he said. “While I believe strongly in keeping families together, I don’t think there was any way to save mine.”

He was taken to MacLaren Children’s Center, which he remembers as a prison-like facility that kept 17-year-olds in the same dormitory-style room as 6-year-olds like Andrew.

For eight or nine months he lived there. Occasionally, he got beaten up.

To this day, Bridge despises institutional facilities and opposes using them as anything more than a very temporary housing option until foster-care homes are located.

“It doesn’t work, it’s extremely expensive and it’s harmful,” he said.

Finally, Andrew was shuttled to two or three foster homes before finding a permanent arrangement with a family in Canoga Park.

He thinks his All-American looks helped get him adopted.

“I had the advantage of being appealing,” he said. “I was a very cute, well-behaved little Caucasian boy. I had the ability to stand out. But I wasn’t the kid who needed most.”

Though Bridge said he found stability with what he describes as a middle- to working-class foster family, he said the parents--who had three children of their own, as well as other foster children on a temporary basis--paid little attention to him.

“I’m not sure why they took me in,” he said. He no longer speaks to them nor his foster siblings.

By 10th grade at El Camino Real High School, however, Bridge said he “put it all together.” He took Advanced Placement classes and was a member of the swim and debate teams. As a senior, he was elected student body president.

After graduating from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, which provided a substantial scholarship, Bridge went on to Harvard, and on to foster-care work.

He admits that “as a lawyer, sometimes it is tough when you see a small glimpse of yourself in someone.”

And it is where he’s been that continues to drive him.

“I want to make people realize that so many kids in foster care don’t have to be left behind,” he said. “I was the exception. I don’t have to be.”