Patchwork Family : Ventura Couple Taps 2 Nations in Building a Tightknit Household

Surrounded by the loving faces of their five adopted children, Larry and Linda Sellers say they consider their family just as tightknit as any clan of blood relatives.

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In a modest, five-bedroom Ventura ranch house filled with music, antique furniture and family snapshots, they have built their patchwork family one by one.

Their daughters and son came to them almost by luck of the draw, from two foreign nations, a host of adoption agencies and even a catalogue of unwanted orphans.

But now, 19-year-old Katie says, “we’re just like any other family where their parents had them.

“We spend a lot of time together and share a lot of things,” she says. “Sometimes we fight, but most of the time it’s kind of fun--all the different personalities in one place.”

Unable to have children of their own, Linda and Larry began adopting in 1975. That spring, Operation Babylift’s crusade to evacuate Vietnamese orphans focused the world’s attention--and the couple’s--on the thousands of unwanted children in Asia.

They brought Abby, now 17, and Danny, now 19, from orphanages in Seoul, South Korea. They adopted Betsy, now 14, and Katie, who were abandoned as newborns on South Korean streets. And they took their youngest, 13-year-old Chomana, from an orphanage in Bangkok.

It was not easy at first.

Family friends asked why they didn’t “go domestic,” Linda says.

“I realize it’s very important to some people to have their own children,” says Linda, 49, a schoolteacher. “And they go to great lengths, and they spend a lot of time and a lot of money trying to have their own children. That never seemed that important to us.”

The children suffered the effects of scrutiny too. In younger years, they came home crying over racial remarks.

Classmates tugged at their own temples, taunting the Sellers’ children with what Abby calls “Chinese eyes.” And teachers, Katie remembers, often remarked offhandedly on how smart Asians are.

But from the moment the Sellers’ children could understand, their parents tried to make sure that they had the love and support they needed.

And while the children began life as orphans, Linda and Larry hammered home the notion that now they are family and this will always be home.

Linda and Larry met in 1972.

Courting on pizza parlor dates and snow-country picnics, the schoolteacher and the former Army radioman began to fall in love.

About a year later, the Ventura couple pledged their lives to each other, tied the knot and planned to start having children right away.

God, they say, had other plans.

For two years, the couple tried to conceive, but their efforts ended only in frustration and tears.

Then Operation Babylift showed them the way.

The couple applied to the Ventura County Social Services Agency, which in those days administered a state-run international adoption program.

“We said we wanted a baby girl, and they try to match you up--they give you one,” Larry recalls. “They showed us Katie, and we accepted.”

Abandoned soon after birth at a police kiosk in Kwangju, South Korea, 10-month-old Katie was delivered to the couple in 1976.

Katie--who now plays four or five instruments, who works as a teacher’s aide at her mother’s school, who plans to enter UC Santa Barbara this fall, and who hopes eventually to become a doctor and mother.

Next came Abby, left in a Seoul orphanage by her mother at 5 months of age and signed over to Larry and Linda in 1978.

Abby the ballet dancer, who also tumbles and cheers with the Buena High School pep squad, plays vibes with the school orchestra and takes photos for the class yearbook.

Abby, like her siblings, says she fully appreciates the parents who removed her from a culture that looks down on orphans as dishonored outcasts.

“If I was in Seoul, Korea, at my age, I could be working in an orphanage or selling flowers on the streets,” she says. “I wouldn’t have the opportunity to do what I’ve done.”

Then--the girls just had to have a brother--came Danny.

Linda and Larry learned in 1979 of the 3 1/2-year-old boy living in a Seoul orphanage, his left fingers horribly burned and fused together in a mitt of scar tissue that had to be surgically corrected.

Danny went on to be a track athlete at Buena High, a Ventura city lifeguard and--at age 19--Ventura College student and budding pharmacist.

Over the years, Linda and Larry grew more accustomed to the Byzantine world of international adoption, where endless paper trails and garbled messages in foreign tongues can stretch the already frustrating yearlong grind to nearly three years.

“It’s a long process,” Larry says now. “You must be very patient.”

Even at 3 1/2, Katie was so used to tagging along with mom to Los Angeles International Airport to watch other parents pick up newly adopted babies that her first visit to a maternity ward was a shock.

Linda recalls her daughter looking at a newborn and insisting, “That’s not Carol’s baby; it didn’t come on a plane!”

For a time, they reveled in the way that their family was coming together.

Linda co-founded a support group called Mothers of Inter-Country Adoption, and the couple made a standing offer to help the children locate and meet their biological parents if they ever decide to begin a search.

But once Danny arrived, Larry Sellers called a halt to the adoptions.

It was New Year’s Eve morning, 1980, when he met Linda’s requests for another child with a weary, “No more kids.”

“In my heart and in myself, there just wasn’t room for any more kids,” says Larry Sellers, 49 and wiser now.

So Linda quit bugging him.

Barely a year later, a social worker visited the family with a folder of data on a new orphan. “I think,” she told them, “I have another Sellers for you.”

And when Linda and Larry read the brief paragraph on how infant Betsy was abandoned in Seoul, when they saw her picture and weighed their finances, they did what they felt they should: They brought her home.

Now 14, lanky, cheerful Betsy plays softball and basketball at Ventura Missionary School, and plans to enter Buena High next year.

As the Sellers family grew, finances grew drum-tight. The family took fewer vacations, bought fewer clothes.

“We knew at the time we couldn’t do it alone, we needed help,” Larry recalls.

“I’ve got the strong provider role. I’ve got to go out and kill the bear and bring home the dinner and all that, but there was no way to provide for four children,” he recalls. “But Scripture says God always takes care of widows and orphans and, in spite of everything that’s happened here, our children have everything they need.”

Soon after Betsy arrived, so did help.

A woman who runs a used clothing store in Ventura asked Linda to help her hand out some excess stock to adoptive families.

One night, Linda came home to find her living room two feet deep, wall-to-wall, in bags of used clothing.

“I was able to sort it out, to size it and wash it,” and set up a clothing co-op for adoptive families in west Ventura County, she said. “And in the process of this, my own children had clothing.”

For nearly 10 years, the Sellers family seemed complete.

Then Romania erupted in bloody revolution, leaving thousands of children in state-run orphanages and a bug in Katie’s ear.

With television news reports bemoaning the fates of unwanted orphans, Katie began pestering her parents, “What are you going to do about it?”

Night after night for three months, Katie played a tape of the song, “Who Will Save the Children?” until finally, Linda recalls, Larry caved in and said, “OK, we will.”

Husband and wife took turns reading the Holt International Adoption Agency’s magazine, skimming photos and dossiers of unwanted children from all over the world.

“And there was our Chomana,” says Linda, a gentle grin gracing her face as she recalls the first glimpse of her youngest daughter. “Independently . . . Larry and I both picked the same child out. And then we really did know that she was for us.”

Adoption proceedings began in 1990.

Chomana was living in a Bangkok orphanage, unable to walk because of a spinal disorder. Her father had been killed in a truck crash. With five other children at home, Chomana’s mother cast her aside, unable to pay for the many operations she would need to be able to walk.

But by 1993, Chomana had gained much-needed medical care, a new home, new parents and new siblings who dote on her and call her “Chom.”

Now in the fifth grade, Chomana is zipping through math lessons at an even pace with classmates at Friends Elementary School, where her mother teaches third grade. Drawing and painting classes fuel her love for art and fill her portfolio with illustrations of flowers, exotic animals and jungle scenes.

But she is struggling with American culture--with all the vague complexities of English and history lessons on a homeland she has known for only two years.

“If I had to do what Chom has to do with all the innuendoes and exceptions . . . ,” Linda says, shaking her head. “At the same time she’s learning English, she’s getting great, missing chunks of history.”

But Chomana also keeps a firm hold on her Thai roots.

While Abby and Katie’s room is festooned with ballet posters, Danny’s with pictures of his favorite singers and Betsy’s with pictures of basketball stars, Chomana’s night stand and desk hold framed snapshots of her mother, their house and her Bangkok friends.

In this diversity, Danny says, the family finds strength and happiness.

“We’ve got attitudes and social lives that are totally different,” he says. “We’ve got sports, we’ve got music, we’ve got drawing. . . . We’re quite a vast spectrum.”

In the evening, they come together at home much as they did in life--one by one.

Linda brings home Chom, then rushes off to pick up Betsy from a softball game. Meanwhile, Abby walks in and plunks down at the dining table with Chom to go over homework.

Half an hour later, Linda returns with the limping Betsy, who bashed her knee sliding into third.

While Betsy throws her leg up on the kitchen counter to nurse it with ice, Linda readies supper, Ping-Ponging between a bubbling stewpot and a fridge papered with flyers, photos and Bible quotations.

“I don’t usually get hurt,” muses Betsy, who stands 5 feet, 9 inches. “I’m the one that usually hurts other people.”

Katie breezes in a short time later, sitting down to play a meticulous version of a love song from “Miss Saigon” on the tragically out-of-tune baby grand.

A calico cat and cream-and-chocolate-colored dog roam the house, demanding attention.

In walks Danny, doffing the tie he must wear to his drugstore job. He retires to his room to attack his checkbook, heavy metal tunes snarling from his CD player as he hunkers over receipts.

By the time Larry trudges in from his job as a microwave systems engineer in Calabasas, the Sellers’ house fairly buzzes with the chaotic music of family life.

“Mom?” Chom asks. “What cups should I put out?”

“Well,” he says with a Thursday night sigh. “Are we going to make it through this week?”

“Oh, I think so, Pop,” Linda assures him.

On a report that Miss Piggy is hungry, Katie hustles out to the cluttered garage to feed her guinea pig--which was found to be male long after the name stuck.

Chom lays out plates, forks and knives on the oval dining table, in an airy family room where handmade samplers hang on the walls and the shelves are lined with antique china plates.

Your choice, Linda says.

“Thank goodness we’re past the age when the color of the cup matters to the kids,” she confides. “I never thought I’d see the end of it, ‘That’s my blue cup,’ ‘That’s my green cup.’ ”

Then they sit, join hands, bow heads and give thanks for their supper.

Larry and Linda are at a comfortable midpoint in life--no longer young parents struggling with strange, new children, but not yet old folks living alone with adult children scattered all over the map.

Supper table patter ebbs and flows.

Table-wide discussion of Katie’s calculus test breaks off into side chats, sibling to sibling and parent to child, on car costs, early risers and motor oil.

Bread and salad circle the table from hand to hand, amid overlapping conversations peppered with good-natured teasing.

At one point, Larry and Danny jump up simultaneously for seconds, falling into an after-you-my-dear-friend shtick at the stewpot.

“Danny could not be any more my son if he was created from scratch,” Larry says later. “Because he is my son.”

The parents and children have all the hallmarks of a traditional nuclear family:

Their phone is busy, their cars overworked, and their calendar chockablock with practices, games, recitals and parties. They share sibling rivalry, petty squabbles and rib-nudging, inside jokes.

But they also seem to have achieved an extraordinary unity that would be the envy of many families.

Danny says he sees the Sellers household as a place where “you don’t have to worry about how you show your emotions, your love or sorrow. And if you do show your emotions, you don’t have to worry about it backfiring on you.

“It’s that fallback place where you can go and have people support you,” he says. “With family, you don’t have to fear rejection.”