Qualified by Sad Experience : Head of Children’s Legal Agency Has Been Through the Hardships of Neglect and Foster Care Firsthand

Before he graduated from Harvard Law School, 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 the 5-year-old didn’t have a key. And his mother worked as a prostitute and often didn’t come home until 11 p.m.

So night after night, he 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.

His journey to a position as a guardian of children’s rights has been a long, strange one. His parents served time 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, Bridge said, 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. “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. “What we do is represent kids and talk to them, find out what they want.”

Although 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.

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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 formed in 1992.

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

And in working with children, it helps that Bridge made it through some of the same things.

He is willing to tell his story, although 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.

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

Bridge, who was sent back to Chicago to his grandmother’s house, hasn’t seen his father since.

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When his mother was released, she telephoned Bridge’s grandmother, told her that she had gone straight, gotten a beautician’s job in North Hollywood and wanted her son back.

So 5-year-old Andrew flew 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, Bridge’s mother was frequently absent or at the beauty shop.

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

Bridge said he later found out that his mother had worked as a prostitute 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. “Even then, before we got money, I would take it from her or she would spend it.”

He does not blame his mother, 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 . . . she never made me doubt that she loved me,” he said.

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One day near Christmas, 6-year-old Bridge watched his mother get arrested while shoplifting his present. It was, he remembers, “a little rubber green man.”

By that time, he and his mother had been kicked out of their apartment as well as several seedy motels. On occasion, they lived on the street--a rare sight 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.

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 him.

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

Although the working-class foster family provided a stable home, they had three children of their own as well as other foster children, and paid little attention to him.

“I’m not sure why they took me in,” he said. He no longer speaks to them or his foster siblings.

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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 swimming 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 to Harvard Law School, and on to foster care work.

“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.”