RENSSELAERVILLE — Gerard Wallace, who grew up in Brooklyn, suffered as a child and so devoted his career to ending childhood suffering.

Retired now, he lives in the rural Helderbergs and believes some of the worst suffering happens in rural areas.

Wallace, a lawyer who advocated for kinship family rights, had a hand in creating a dozen laws in New York state that gives grandmothers and other kin rights in caring for children whose parents are unfit.

The many awards he’s won are displayed in his Rensselaerville home along with pictures of grandmothers he has helped across the years and around the country.

“Why I got into kinship care and meeting grandparents raising kids is that my home was really a broken home,” Wallace says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “My father was an alcoholic, worked on the waterfront. He was a good person but, when he drank, it was a nightmare …. We grew up in a state of toxic stress.”

Wallace was born prematurely, at seven months, and weighed just 3 pounds, 2 ounces at birth. “I am very lucky to have vision. Most kids were put in incubators back then and then went blind,” he said, citing Stevie Wonder as someone who was born prematurely in the same era and placed in an incubator where the excess oxygen left him blind.

Wallace wore “glasses thick as Coke bottles,” he said, and was the smartest kid in his class at school.

“I had to fight all the time,” he said. “My father said, every time he looked out the window, I was putting my glasses aside and having a fight. That’s Brooklyn.”

When he was in the eighth grade, Wallace took a competitive exam given to students in the greater metropolitan area and got a scholarship to Regis High School, a highly regarded all-boys Jesuit school in Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

“That was my ticket out of Brooklyn,” Wallace said, noting the Jesuits’ left-leaning perspective distinguished him from the rest of his family. “My brother was a John Bircher. He almost was police commissioner, super tough guy, super smart guy, a nice man but, you know, with leanings,” said Wallace.

At Regis High School, Wallace read Homer in Greek. He likened his education to that of the nation’s Founding Fathers, steeped in the classics.

“Virtue,” he said, came to mean “someone who was stoic, who could stand up, had ethics, and thought that behaving ethically was more important than their individual interest.”

He posited that there is a dichotomy in most cultures between the self-interested and those who are interested in others.

Rolling stone

After graduating from Regis, Wallace said, “I went to Fordham — and my mother died.”

The seven or eight years after college were tortuous. “I’m lucky I’m alive,” said Wallace. “I worked in the South Bronx in a model cities program, picking up garbage …. The violence was insane. We were two blocks from what they called Fort Apache, which had been firebombed.”

He hung out with locals on methadone and, when he started to do heroin, he said, “That’s it. I’m out of here.”

Wallace was influenced by Erving Goffman’s book, “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” which drove the next phase of his life.

He married his girlfriend and they moved to a sugarhouse in New Hampshire with no running water. “Here’s a silly man from New York City who knows nothing about the country,” said Wallace.

“This book drove me to the sugar house because basically, Goffman said, ‘Everything you do is about self-interest. Even when you’re doing the most altruistic actions, you’re really doing it to show how great you are.’”

Wallace said he “ran away” because he didn’t know who he was anymore and he wanted to “get beyond that self-interest.”

After he and his wife parted ways, Wallace moved back to New York City, describing himself as a “rolling stone,” working a number of different jobs.

Buddhism

His life changed dramatically when he attended a lecture given by Sonam Kazi, a Buddhist teacher from the royal family “who spoke better English than me.”

“This is my chance,” Wallace said, “and I cultivated a friendship.”

He stayed with and learned from Kazi and his family for over a decade, serving as his chauffeur, bodyguard, and manservant while practicing Buddhism.

“The ultimate goal is to understand what there is in you that is not governed by your self-interest,” said Wallace.

Wallace referred to his 12 years with Kazi as “Buddhist bootcamp.”

He said, “I slept on a rug. I didn’t have any cooking facilities. And he made it tough but he was good to me. I traveled to India with him, traveled to Hawaii. I’ve met the Dalai Lama over a dozen times because they were personal friends.”

He described the Dalai Lama as heaving an “emanation,” similar to the halos that the saints are often painted with.

“And the halos are kind of representations of that quality that’s kind of ineffable, not really demonstrated or something that you can’t grasp but permeates what’s going on.”

To this day, Wallace said of Buddhism, “It informs every minute of my life and really is a source of delight.”

Love and law school

Wallace left his job on Wall Street and moved to Woodstock where he became a moving man. He was moving furniture for Karen Nagel, a physical therapist and doctor’s daughter, and fell in love. They were married before the year was out.

“She’s marvelous — and the opposite of me,” said Wallace.

They lived in a post-and-beam barn next to Big Pink where Bob Dylan and the Band had recorded “The Basement Tapes” and the Band wrote parts of their album “Music from Big Pink.”

Although it was two decades since he originally planned to go to law school after graduating from Fordham, Nagel encouraged him to apply.

He did, and was admitted to Albany Law School. Wallace graduated magna cum laude but, at age 49, thought he was too old to become a lawyer “at a law firm with a bunch of guys in suits and ties.”

He had won a fellowship that required him to write a monograph on elder care. He wrote about grandparents raising their grandchildren.

“I got bitten,” he said, as he tried to figure out the difference between custody and guardianship in New York. That difference has now changed because of the advocacy he spearheaded.

It used to be that custody did not give grandparents enough rights to really care for their grandchildren while guardianship is “a full-fledged opportunity to care for a child,” Wallace said. “The distinguishing elements are in the education law, the health law … and the social-services law.”

The first woman Wallace interviewed who was raising her grandchildren had a note from her lawyer that was signed by the parent, saying, “You are now the guardian.”

Wallace said that was a “totally bogus legal document that meant nothing at the time.”

The second grandmother he worked with had taken her grandchild when Child Protective Services called to say they were going to remove the toddler from her daughter because she was doing drugs.

Since the toddler was not removed by Child Protective Services, the grandmother was not eligible for any services.

“I had the two major issues that I spent the next 25 years of my life fighting about,” said Wallace.

Kinship family rights

He noted that kinship care has gone on for centuries and that the father of the nation was also raising grandchildren who were not his own.

“George Washington had his grandchildren and he didn’t have a legal arrangement,” said Wallace.

Washington’s wife, Martha, had been left with two surviving children — John and Martha — after her husband, Daniel Custis, died in 1757. She married Washington in 1759.

After her son, John, died in 1781 at the siege of Yorktown, George and Martha Washington took in his two young children, Eleanor and George.

“They are the first children who lived in the presidential residence in New York City ….,” Wallace noted. “George Washington’s not only the father, he’s the grandfather of our country.”

Wallace got his first job after law school at Hunter College, running the Grandparent Caregiver Law Center. He answered “calls from all over” on a warm line as opposed to a hotline.

“I’m not solving crises,” he explained. “I’m trying to give advice and point people towards solutions.”

As he listened to caregivers and their common concerns, he went on to push for a dozen state laws and wrote an amicus brief for a case heard by the United States Supreme Court.

He started traveling around the state, giving lectures. He was instrumental in setting up the Kinship Navigator program, founded in 2004, where he worked for the rest of his career.

The Kinship Navigator has both a website (nysnavigator.org) and a phone line (877-454-6463) to help coordinate the response of the government in communities across New York, serving all 62 counties.

Wallace has vivid recollections of visiting Saint Lawrence County “and sitting there with a bunch of grandmas who were farmers.”

People think of kinship care as being urban, Wallace said. But, he went on, “It’s everywhere. All these rural communities up here now, folks raising their children’s children.”

His visit to Saint Lawrence County left him “flabbergasted,” he said. “A lot of the worst stories that I’ve heard are in rural communities … The grandmothers just break down with ‘I don’t know what to do. I can’t bear that this child was in that home and I can’t get her out.’ “

Getting children out of unsafe homes is more common in inner cities, Wallace said. “They remove children from brown families very quickly,” he said, “but removals in rural areas don’t happen with the same knee-jerk reaction. So I think one of the byproducts of that is me hearing stories that actually hit me as more atrocious.”

Looking back at his career, Wallace said, “Getting the law to line up with what’s best for the child was a lifetime of work. And it’s not done.”

Wallace is very proud of his own daughter, Katie. He and his wife traveled to China when he was 52 to adopt her. Katie is now 26.

Wallace and Nagel were warned before they went to the orphanage, “These kids have never seen white people before, and they’re all babies, right? And they all break down crying.”

Wallace went on, “That didn’t happen. Katie put her hand on my wife’s shoulder, embraced her, and went to sleep.”

Katie worked summers at the county nursing home where her mother oversaw physical therapy. “She just fell in love with the elderly and could not believe … how anyone involved in nursing-home care is swimming against the tide.”

After Katie got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees to pursue that work, she realized she didn’t want to be behind a desk; she’d rather work directly with patients

“So she’s going back to get a master’s as a clinician in social work,” said her father. “And she’s marvelous, running support groups and she’s just a wonderful person …. beautiful and smart, and she calls us almost every night.”

Wallace concluded with words of encouragement for the grandparents and other relatives and even family friends who are caring for children in need.

“They deserve the respect and admiration of their community, and they deserve all the help they can get. And I’ve told you a few ways that they can go get help, but they should not be ashamed,” he said, “not think of what they’re doing is because of a failure. 

“It isn’t. Life throws us many turns, many curveballs. You’re doing the most important job in the world. I admire you, appreciate, and love all of you for what you are doing.”