Rebuilding Their Lives : The emotional and physical scars are healing. The fractured homes are being repaired. Yet one year after the devastating Sierra Madre quake, thousands are still struggling at . . .

Ayear ago today at 7:43 a.m., the Sierra Madre earthquake sent shards of glass from ceiling-high windows flying into empty pews and hymnals of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Monrovia.

It has taken a year--exactly--for the 298-member congregation to rebuild its sanctuary. Today, with banners and brass ensemble, church members will celebrate the end of their yearlong recovery from the 5.8-magnitude quake that rocked forth from the San Gabriel Mountains and rumbled from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border.

The church’s dedication represents a symbolic milestone in the recuperation process for thousands of people--most of them in the western San Gabriel Valley--whose ceilings and walls cracked, chimneys collapsed, plate-glass windows exploded or houses shifted on their foundations.

Officials in the five hardest-hit cities say that the recovery is mostly complete. Thousands of panes of glass have been replaced, hundreds of chimneys rebuilt, and dozens of houses and public buildings touched up with everything from new beams to stone fascia.

“It’s certainly not forgotten,” Sierra Madre’s public works director, Kev Tcharkhoutian, said of the quake. “But basically, the healing is in the final phases.”

The rebuilding process has helped heal the emotional wounds too.

“A year, it’s a long time. But we’ve come out better on the other side,” said the Rev. James Thompson of St. Paul’s. “Our people have really drawn together to resolve the problems created when all the glass came tumbling down.”

Reiterating comments made last fall, officials last week said the total dollar damage may never be precisely compiled. Donna Butler, Arcadia’s assistant planning director, said: “There’s no way of getting exact figures.”

Across the San Gabriel Valley, at least $50 million has been spent rebuilding structures such as houses, businesses and public facilities, mostly in Altadena, Arcadia, Pasadena, Monrovia and Sierra Madre.

The U.S. Small Business Administration has granted $41.9 million in loans to 1,500 applicants. Three-fourths of this money is going for residential repairs.

The state’s emergency disaster loan program--for those who cannot qualify for any other loans--has approved lending $10 million, an amount authorized in March and not subject to the current budget debate in Sacramento.

But, here and there across the valley, gaps in the recovery remain. The damage to some buildings may take years to repair.

One is the house in Monrovia where the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author Upton Sinclair lived from 1942 to 1966. The owners had wanted to demolish the 68-year-old concrete structure because it sustained such heavy damage.

Preservation questions arose, however, because the residence is a National Historic Landmark, one of only 2,000 in the nation, according to Monrovia assistant planner Vance Pomeroy.

Now, after months of debate, Pomeroy said, the owners plan to restore the house, pending approval from a host of authorities.

In Arcadia, a motel is still closed and the post office has temporary supports holding up the walls. Plans have only recently been submitted to rebuild the Arcadia Motel 6, where commodes were splintered and showers ripped from the walls. And the main Arcadia post office is to be relocated by August so that repairs can begin.

At the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, small repairs were completed right after the quake, but the museum is still $200,000 short of raising $500,000 needed to repair an 84-foot, two-story wall of the art gallery, Huntington spokeswoman Peggy Bernal said.

On the human plane, there may be no way to measure the turmoil the Sierra Madre quake has visited upon the daily lives of its victims, even when insurance was paying the bills.

Typical of those with more than a toppled chimney, the five-member Doyle clan of Baldwin Avenue in Sierra Madre spent October to March living at the expense of their insurance company in a Residence Inn while $63,000 in repairs were made to their two-story house built in 1905.

“It really did take us a year to recover,” said Sharon Doyle, a 43-year-old television scriptwriter. The grades of her three children have now improved, she said. “I don’t have earthquake dreams anymore. The Episcopal church up the street is being rebuilt. People almost never talk about the earthquake anymore.”

In a year in which the state witnessed the Oakland Hills fire, the Eureka earthquake in Northern California, the floods of February and the Los Angeles riots, Doyle said, the June 28 quake seems not so terrible anymore.

For Rick Allor, however, the quake is as persistent as the sound of the earthmover which last week rumbled around the lot where he, his wife, Debbie, and their two children, ages 9 and 14, once lived in a 1920s adobe house in Sierra Madre, but now reside in two trailers.

Theirs was one of 403 damaged and 22 condemned in Sierra Madre, the city with the highest concentration of residential damage from the quake. Circumstances have made them one of the last to begin rebuilding and will keep them under a shroud of debt for years to come.

Allor, 42, is a landscape contractor and his 38-year-old wife is a bookkeeper.

Eight months before the quake, the Allors bought the $203,000 house after saving for years. They had no earthquake insurance. Now, thanks to an SBA loan and the support of friends, neighbors and even strangers, they are rebuilding. But their debt on the modest property has grown from $168,000 before the quake to $260,000 today.

Right now, “laundry is our biggest nightmare,” said Debbie Allor, who spends Saturdays grocery shopping and taking clothes to the Laundromat.

“You’ve got to keep the right attitude or you’d go nuts,” he said, looking at the foundation of the new house rising from the earth.

One Monrovia family, the Harrahills, have been mired in the red tape of loan programs, unable to begin repairing up to $96,000 in damage to their two-story, 3,000-square-foot house.

With help from Rosemary Harrahill’s parents, the family bought the $374,000, turn-of-the-century house three weeks before the quake. They had no earthquake insurance. And the family, with five children, still had not sold their other Monrovia residence.

Carrying two mortgages and unable to sell their first house until April, the Harrahills couldn’t afford the payments on an SBA loan. So they were referred to the state loan program, the California Natural Disaster Assistance program.

“It’s just taken so doggone long,” she said. “The state is not mobilized in any expedient way.”

Yet, even a more distant resolution awaits one earthquake story, which eventually will cost the Valley one of its cherished landmarks.

Not far from the Allors, nestled against the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, the 1920s Spanish-style monastery of the Passionist monks was more heavily damaged than apparent from the flatlands.

Repair estimates are roughly $1 million for the 45,000 square-foot, three-story building, said Father Clemente Barron. Tearing it down would cost only $150,000.

“There are sentiments in our little city for keeping the monastery building,” he said. “But our only responsible decision is to take it down. Our engineers said if there is another quake, the walls will fall.”

An adjacent building, a retreat facility, wasn’t damaged and is still in operation.

Earthquakes cause the kind of suffering which, Father Clemente said, his religious order helps people reflect upon, and then conquer by the grace of God.

“The earthquake tells us that no human setting is eternal,” he said. “Earthquakes have helped people move on. It’s helping us to move on. . . . Even if people are saddened by the fact that the building won’t be there, what brought us here will endure: the solitude, the beauty.”

Of all the wounds inflicted by the quake, none may be as enduring as the sadness and pain that still fill the life of Art Lerille, a longtime horse trainer at Santa Anita. His bride-to-be, Juli Nickoley, 34, who was standing at his side the moment the earth began to shake, was killed by a 20-foot piece of steel support from the track’s grandstands.

“This is a hell of an experience for me, from both sides of the coin, physical and emotional,” said 56-year-old Lerille, who also was injured by the beam. His left side was smashed, his left arm and left leg broken.

Since the accident, Lerille has taken pain medication daily. He walks with a cane. He has had two operations. A third is planned. “I don’t sleep well. I can’t pick up a horse’s leg and I can’t ride. But all this is nothing compared to losing Juli.”

Today, as always on Sundays, he will also go to the Monrovia cemetery where she is buried. And on her grave, he will place roses from his San Dimas yard. “It’s going to be a hell of day for me, I know. But I can’t change it.”