Commentary by John Swan
When I first wandered into Jamaica Plain in 1969 my Cambridge friends warned me that it was a dangerous place. Crime and arson plagued the deteriorating neighborhood, especially around Jamaica Pond. The state also planned to cut an I-95 extension through the middle of Boston and Jamaica Plain, further isolating the already struggling area.
But in what became a national model for community activism, a new group of young urban homesteaders began the process of turning Jamaica Plain into what is now– the jewel of Boston. Leading the way was Gerry Wright, a former Methodist minister turned environmentalist / human service provider, along with a large group of newly minted activists in the early 1970s who helped stop the I-95 extension.
On May 21 hundreds gathered at the Loring Greenough House to celebrate Gerry’s 90th birthday and his long list of accomplishments, including founding Community Service Care, which has stepped back from its original mission of providing residential services for young adults in need, to now becoming an incubator supporting grassroots organizations and local leadership.
As Gerry steps down as CEO, while still filling a roll as advisor, he leaves a legacy that will shine for generations to come.
“I’ll remember all the spirit here until my last day,” he told supporters and former clients, some coming from as far away as North Carolina. “Now let’s go forward and help this community, and far beyond, to be a better society.”
“Gerry never tried to hand down sage advice,” said new CEO Allison Yoos, who explained part of his leadership skills was that “he just lets each one of us follow our own personality.”
“The only way to describe Gerry is that he has a calming energy that is also full of fire,” said Chrystal Jones, a former client while at Boston University and now a Board member of Community Service Care.
An irascible, undeniable force of nature, Gerry would have fit in as comfortably with 19th century icons Walt Whitman and Fredrick Law Olmsted (both of whom he portrayed in one-man shows) as he has with modern political and social leaders he’s worked with like James Meredith, Norman Vincent Peale, Jack and Ted Kennedy, and Michael Dukakis.
A short list of organizations Gerry has founded includes: in 1964, the Dynamic Action Residence Enterprise (DARE), a nationally recognized leader in supported housing for young adults at risk of being institutionalized; in 1975, the Massachusetts Council of Human Service Providers to help develop funding sources for non-profits; in 1982, Community Service Care, continuing DARE’s mission; in 1983, the Jamaica Pond Project, renovating the boat house and bandstand while cleaning up the area and making it safe after years of neglect; then in 1996, The Caring Force to advocate for human service workers.
Always willing to share the stage, Gerry credits his working partners Charlie Hauck who managed the human services, and Christine Cooper who ran the Jamaica Pond Project, as crucial to the groups’ success. “Charlie and Christine did the real work in the trenches,” he said. Both have since passed, but Gerry has remained the heartbeat of JP’s resurgence for the past seven decades.
It all started here in JP in 1957 when Gerry, a graduate student in the divinity program at Boston University, saw a flight of seagulls heading inland and asked a friend where they were going. His friend said Jamaica Pond. According to his son Matt, who has moved on from his leadership role in the I Have a Dream Foundation to help Gerry and his organization transition to new leadership under Allison, “Gerry followed those gulls and never left.”
Although over the years, Gerry did make more than a few sorties outside JP.
In the early 1970s Gerry’s appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson help publicize the importance of the DARE program to the nation
Then in the 1980s he made 34 trips to the Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine, running marathons and creating the Worldwide Running Club for Peace, the American Ukrainian Trade Council and the American Russian Forestry Alliance.
Those trips led to his fateful meeting in 1991 in Boston with the first president of free Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, who invited Gerry to visit him in Ukraine. During that trip Gerry mentioned that he and his wife Thalia, an arts administrator and theater director, were interested in adopting a child. Kravchuk suggested Gerry visit a local Ukraine orphanage, “And when I saw this beautiful, magical child, just 20 months old, I knew she was the one,” he said.
“So much has happened in the Ukraine, I don’t know what my life would have been like if not for Gerry and Thalia,” said their daughter Emily, a former Park Ranger now working in retail. “But I realize every day I’m living a Cinderella story. My dad and mom have always been the number one cheerleaders for me and my brother, and I’m blessed to have a sibling to look up to.”
Then in 2015, at the age of eighty, Gerry decided to bring his environmental message nationwide, driving alone in a cross-country tour performing his popular Olmsted play “Passages in Life of an Unpractical Man” in national parks throughout the country. But before he left Thalia insisted Gerry, who eschews high tech, carry a cell phone with him.
“He did use it,” she laughed, “But it’s been in a drawer ever since then.”
Gerry’s life in the public forum should come as no surprise since he had an auspicious beginning. In 1935 he was one of the infants chosen to represent Clapp’s Baby Foods in ads in publications like Life magazine. Then Depression and World War Two shaped his first ten years. “That’s when my soul and spirit developed,” he explained. “When I see a problem it takes me back to my youth when I learned from my family to help other people.”
That background lead him to the University of Maine, Cornell, Boston University, Methodist Church in Essex where he served four years as Minister, and what he calls his first “soul-searching trip” around the United States in 1962– and of course, following the gulls here to Jamaica Plain.
It’s been a long journey, but along the way Gerry said he’s learned the importance of “embracing the challenges of life, and how connected we all are to the earth and to each other.”
It’s been our blessing that he chose to settle in our community. Every resident of JP owes a debt of gratitude to this amazing man. I’m honored to call him not just a friend, but also a brother. He is a without a doubt a man for all seasons.