Adoptive DeBolts : Life Is Quieter Without Patter of 40 Little Feet

Who are the DeBolts and what has become of their 20 kids?

Ten years ago, the world was introduced to Bob and Dorothy DeBolt and their brood through a documentary in which narrator Henry Winkler asked: “Who are the DeBolts and why do they have 19 kids?”

The Piedmont, Calif., couple had undertaken the formidable task of raising their own six children, then adopted 13 more, many of them physically or mentally handicapped. (The 20th was added to the family roster after the documentary was made.)

The documentary showed how the couple, a former music teacher and a civil engineer, with no formal training in dealing with the “physically challenged,” raised the crew and taught them to live successfully in a non-handicapped world.

Retired From Child Rearing

Since then, all of the DeBolt children have grown up and left home. A year and a half ago, Bob and Dorothy DeBolt, having “retired” from child rearing, moved to a spacious home on the outskirts of El Cajon. One wall of their high-ceilinged living room is covered with plaques, awards, paintings and photographs, including one of the couple with President Reagan.

The DeBolts, stylishly dressed, look young for their age--he is 57 and she is 65. It is immediately obvious why television talk show host Dinah Shore once remarked about the couple, “You just say hello and duck!” Words tumble quickly from their mouths. They frequently and good-naturedly interrupt each other, then politely hand off the punch lines to favorite family anecdotes.

“We always intended for our children to grow up and leave home,” Dorothy said. “When each of the children flew the nest, it was a wonderful kind of achievement. We don’t pay for anything anymore; they are all fiercely, fully independent.”

The last child moved out two years ago at age 22. John (J. R.) DeBolt, blind and paralyzed from the waist down, now attends Alameda Junior College and lives independently in Berkeley. The rest of the children have ended up in various locales, including Hawaii and Sacramento. Most live in Oakland or Berkeley, where public programs for the handicapped are abundant.

The DeBolts agree that their move to San Diego County has put a distance between them and their children that rules out spontaneous visits, but they also recognize certain advantages.

“There is more freedom of choice for both parties, more of a sense of responsibility instilled in the young people,” Dorothy said. “Often, there’s too much of an inclination for parents to cling.”

Gently Discouraged Him

One adopted son recently spoke of moving to San Diego, but the DeBolts say they have gently discouraged him. The son, now 22 and majoring in accounting at a San Francisco college, told his parents he was thinking of transferring to San Diego State University.

“He said, ‘They have just what I want down there--girls and surfing,’ ” said Bob. “I said, ‘Son, why don’t you stay where you are.’ ”

The DeBolts say that one of the highlights of their lives came when the entire family gathered for its last Christmas in the old house in Piedmont.

“Everyone came home and each child stood in front of the video camera and recalled their memories of the house,” Dorothy said. “There was a lot of laughter, a lot of tears.”

Another triumph came in 1973 with the adoption of Wendy, a blind Korean girl who had been battered and abandoned. Doctors in a Seoul hospital had already removed one of the girl’s eyes, and the DeBolts were informed that only an immediate corneal transplant could provide any possibility of sight.

With the financial help of California Children’s Services, the operation was performed. The girl, who had been dubbed “The Child Who Never Smiles” by Korean orphanage workers, “went darting about the house, cupping the chins of her brothers and sisters and laughing out loud for the sheer joy of seeing for the first time,” Dorothy said. “That’s the kind of ringside seat to miracles we’ve had.”

Among the other children, Phong came to the family at age 8, three years after seeing both his parents killed in a bomb blast in Vietnam.

“Anytime we wanted to find Phong, all we had to do was look under a table and we would find him in a fetal position,” Bob said. Now Phong is the young accounting major with the penchant for surfboards and girls.

Reynaldo, 24, came to the DeBolts nine years ago with crushingly low self-esteem. “He was in trouble with school, the law and himself,” Bob recalled.

Now a single businessman living in Oakland, “Rey is such a pleasure to be around,” Bob said.

The family’s story begins with Dorothy and her first husband, who had five children of their own plus two who were adopted. After Dorothy’s husband died in 1963, she adopted two more children, both war-wounded paraplegics from Vietnam.

Bob DeBolt, divorced with one child, met his future wife on a blind date. “I came to the door that night and here was this mass of little people,” he said.

Nice Pair of Legs

“As I looked up over their heads, coming down the stairway were the best-looking pair of legs in a miniskirt I’ve ever seen,” he grinned. “I sure didn’t expect that, for a widow with nine kids.”

The two were married in 1970. “I fell in love on the first date,” Dorothy said, adding: “I always think I can give some hope to ladies out there who have kids and think they’ll never get married again!”

The DeBolts say that, when they began adding to their family, they had no preparation or formal training in working with children with physical or mental limitations.

“There’s just kind of a gut instinct, and we both have it,” Dorothy said. “We have honed it by asking questions and reading, and by just plain daily living, which has more therapy involved in it than any formal training.”

The DeBolts made no accommodations in their home to ease their children’s handicaps, although that wasn’t part of a grand scheme--it was simply because of a lack of money. As it turned out, the daily challenge of negotiating a large two-story house worked to the children’s advantage, they said.

“It’s still a non-handicapped world out there, and that’s not going to change,” Bob said.

An Ugly Word

“One of the most difficult things is working with a child who has all these strikes against him . . .” Dorothy said. “They fall and hurt themselves and get frustrated, and you have to keep offering encouragement. Then you go to your room and cry. But you don’t ever weep over that child or offer pity.”

Bob agreed: “The ugliest four-letter word is P-I-T-Y, and there is no place for it in our house.”

The DeBolts proudly point out that none of their children has “gone off the deep end” with drugs or alcohol. They have no magic prescription for raising children, they say, “but we think their own good self-esteem is really what kept them from falling into that trap,” Dorothy said.

One thing, however, they are sure of: “The key to making it work was all the kids reaching out to each other,” Dorothy said.

As an example, the couple points to Sunee, a Korean girl paralyzed by polio whom they adopted in 1971 at the age of 4. The two Vietnamese paraplegic boys, then ages 16 and 17, showed her how to walk on crutches and braces.

“They were able to step in and teach her all the tricks, how to fall and not hurt herself, how to negotiate stairs,” Bob said. “We couldn’t have done it alone.”

Film Crew in Residence

The first documentary about the family was started in 1974 when the DeBolts had 14 children. During the next four years, the couple adopted five more and strived for a normal existence while a film crew in residence documented every waking moment.

“We learned to look both ways when we came out of the shower,” Dorothy joked. Despite the seeming invasion of their privacy, the family became close friends with the film makers and later invited the crew back into their home to make a sequel.

The first film, “Who Are the DeBolts?” won an Academy Award, but Bob is quick to say: “We really can’t take any credit for that. We were like Picasso’s model; we just sat there and lived.”

In 1978, a book about the family, titled “19 Steps Up the Mountain,” was published. The title was a reference not only to their 19 children but to the 19 steps of the stairway in the family home, which each child learned to climb regardless of his or her handicaps.

In 1973, the DeBolts founded their own adoption agency in response to a growing number of inquiries from people who wanted to know how to adopt their own “special needs” child.

“We got close to 60,000 letters after the first film, and close to half wanted to adopt a child like those they saw in the film,” Bob said.

Difficult at First

At the time, he was president of a construction company in Oakland, but he quit his job to devote his time to the new organization, working out of the family’s remodeled garage.

At first, the loss of steady income was difficult as the couple struggled to make the nonprofit agency work. But increased publicity led to a number of speaking engagements and other activities, and the couple now support themselves comfortably giving seminars and making public appearances. They estimate that they have given about 500 speeches in five years, in 48 states and four foreign countries.

Bob DeBolt calls himself “a corporate dropout,” but his wife describes him as “the most successful man in the world.” The decision to leave his career behind was traumatic, he said, but explained: “You get involved in children’s issues and you get hooked.”

“You hear the horror stories . . . you see half a million kids in this country who don’t have the advantages and you’ve got to do something about it,” he said.

Aask (Aid to Adoption of Special Kids) was the first and is now the largest national adoption program for children otherwise considered unplaceable. Aask America, headquartered in Oakland, now has 27 offices across the country and has placed more than 5,000 “special needs” children with adoptive parents. Its main Southern California office in Irvine is one of the busiest, the DeBolts said.

The agency operates on a budget of about $2 million a year, all private donations, according to Bob, and with a staff of about 100, mostly volunteers, in offices from California to Vermont.

The agency, unlike many private adoption agencies, does not charge a fee to prospective parents.

“We always thought it was ridiculous to charge parents to give love to a child who couldn’t find a home otherwise,” Bob said.