Bring Work Home? He Loves It

--They were the unwanted. Physically deformed or emotionally scarred, the children had no champion until they were adopted by Kojo Odo, a bachelor who has single-handedly reared 35 youngsters over the last 15 years. As administrator for special adoptions in Ohio, Odo daily came across children difficult to place, so he just took them into his rambling Columbus house, a former retirement home. Some of his children have visible scars. A boy whose legs were burned when he was dunked in boiling water. A nearly blind hyperactive child. A boy with deformed ears, a cleft palate, dislocated hips and a heart murmur. A girl with syphilis of the spine. Others have emotional wounds. One son saw his mother’s boyfriend beat his younger brother to death. “He was like an animal,” Odo said. Odo’s answer to all the heartbreak the children have suffered is to give them love and stability. “The kids are my dreams,” Odo said. “They bring me a level of satisfaction and achievement. You can take my life . . . my money . . . my car. You can burn down my house. You can’t take away whatever I helped my kids achieve.”

--For the scores of friends and family, it was a way to “get all the frustration and the grief that you feel out,” said Josie Harris, 69, whose quilt panel was unfurled with more than 1,000 others in Central Park as part of Gay Pride Week. The giant quilt, made in memory of some of the 12,000 New Yorkers who have died of AIDS, included an olive-green panel with a teddy bear, dedicated to Harris’ nephew Ronnie Gilder, a poet and journalist who died of the incurable disease. With Harris was friend Cecile Marks, 72, who came to help her friend and stayed to help others make their quilts. “Just as Ronnie had come out of a background that had little hope and little opportunity and became a whole person and had been writing and we lost him, that is what is happening with all our most talented people,” Marks said, holding back tears.

--Hamilton Fish, the nation’s oldest living former congressman, is planning to marry at age 99. Fish, who turns 100 on Dec. 7, will make former prison guard Lydia Ambrogio, 56, his fourth wife in September. Ambrogio has been Fish’s live-in personal secretary for the last four years. “I’ll tell you why I’m marrying her,” said Fish, who was known for his isolationism and opposition to President Franklin D. Roosevelt while he was a Republican congressman from New York. “She’s kept me alive for the last four years . . . and I hope to live another three or four years. She nurses me, she feeds me, she takes care of me in every way.”