Victor Remer, who died June 17 at 88, was the executive director of the Children’s Aid Society from 1965-1981, a period when the venerable welfare association faced a welter of new challenges.

Under his leadership, the society introduced numerous new programs to help developmentally challenged children, opened new health clinics and learning centers, and restructured its bureaucracy to help administer emerging federal programs such as Head Start.

“He set the stage and led us into a whole new era of work,” the Children’s Aid Society’s current chief executive officer, C. Warren Moses, said. “His entire life was devoted to helping poor children and families.”

Born November 27, 1919, in Philadelphia to Russian immigrant parents, Remer moved to New York as a child. He followed some adventurous friends west after high school and attended the University of New Mexico. He returned to New York to attend the Columbia University School of Social Work, where his met his wife, Alma, who became a caseworker. They settled in the Bronx.

Remer worked in administrative positions for the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House and the Neighborhood Conservation Program, and in 1961 was appointed executive director of the University Settlement, a social services agency located on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side. In 1965, he was appointed acting director of the Children’s Aid Society.

Remer closed down several upstate residential facilities for the society that had become redundant as rheumatic fever, diabetes, and other childhood ailments starting taking a lower toll. But new challenges emerged as violence, crime, and drugs all increased during the 1960s and 1970s.

The society’s budget grew to more than $10 million from under $3 million while he was executive director, and the number of children served doubled to more than 100,000.

Today, the society serves over 150,000 children and other clients annually with a budget of over $100 million, said Mr. Moses.

The Children’s Aid Society was founded in 1853 by Charles Loring Brace as an innovative solution to dealing with the city’s many “friendless children,” as orphans were called.

The society shipped them via railroad out West, where farm families in the countryside were found to adopt them. It was among the earliest organized forms of fosterage.

Brace “conceived of the notion of placing the children in the West to remove them from the terrible environs of the city,” Remer told the Dallas Morning News in 1994. “In terms of what we know today, it is not the best way. But from what we knew then, it was a very good idea.”

The orphan trains, as the transport to distant families became known, continued until 1929. By then, Children’s Aid had diversified into many other forms of social work.

After his 1981 retirement, Remer devoted the next quarter-century to preserving and cataloging records of 129,000 orphan train riders. The archival collection, much in demand by historians and genealogists, was donated to the New-York Historical Society in 2006 and named in honor of Remer.

“How many guys would run the place and then spend the next two decades working in the basement?” Mr. Moses said. “He did an incredible service.”

Remer continued to work in the archives until slowed by illness last year.

Remer is survived by his wife, Alma; two daughters, Alice and Sari, and a grandchild.