Hearts of the City : A House of Love : One Couple’s Boundless Compassion Has Given 16 Adopted Children a Second Chance at Life

Getting that first baby sure was a struggle, the Corrodis will tell you, but once they got started, they could hardly seem to stop. A quarter century after beginning their quest to start a family, Jack and Kay Corrodi have succeeded in ways that few would dare, or care, to duplicate.

Once they were a pair of high-flying real estate agents who lived on Malibu’s tony Broad Beach and tooled Pacific Coast Highway in signature striped Cadillacs. Now they pilot twin blue minivans, the better to transport a brood that has grown to 16.

By plucking children from the orphanages of Bolivia, the storefront clinics of Tecate, Mexico, and the drug wards of Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center, this pair of white suburbanites have built a family that is biblical in size and admired by friends and social workers for giving haven to some of society’s most vulnerable souls.

More than half the Corrodi clan was born drug addicted--a scourge that has left the children with enough medical, emotional and learning disabilities to fill a book, literally. Jack and Kay Corrodi learned so much about children born hooked on alcohol and cocaine that they helped write a pamphlet that officials at UCLA once used to help counsel other parents of drug babies.

If the challenges at home weren’t enough, the family has twice had to struggle through bankruptcy, the result of failed real estate deals and high interest rates, Jack Corrodi said. They lost their beach house in the first bankruptcy and had to live for seven years in a double-wide trailer and guest house.

Their pediatrician calls their efforts heroic, their pastor, “deeply spiritual.” But the Corrodis say they get so much in return, they hardly notice how much they are giving. “It’s really selfish on our part. It brings us so much joy,” said Jack Corrodi, 59. “It took us such momentum to get started and get the first baby that I think it just carried us right through all the babies.”

The Corrodis’ quest for family began in 1972. Unable to conceive their own children after two tubal pregnancies, then stalled in early efforts to adopt through Los Angeles County, the couple found a Mexican woman who wanted to give up her daughter. That little girl, Luci, is now 22 and studying to become a court reporter, but Jack still breathlessly recalls “roaring down the 405 Freeway at 2 in the morning to get to the hospital in time to see her born.”

There were many trips after that, forays to Central and South America. Some ended with Jack and Kay clutching a new bundle as they hopped a plane or car for home. Others ended in disappointment--like the time a young Colombian woman wanted to give up her child, but was still in labor when the Corrodis had to leave the country. Failed adoptions “really tore us up,” Jack Corrodi said. So, after adopting seven children, the family began taking in foster children from the county Department of Children’s Services.

The first foster child was so badly damaged by her mother’s drug abuse that, well into childhood, she could not speak or sit up on her own. But the Corrodis persevered--eventually becoming parents to a total of nine more children.

Five years ago, with their finances on the rebound, the family built their dream home near Kanan Dume Road, overlooking the ocean. The expansive pueblo-style house sits on five acres, with horses and chickens. Many of the 11 bedrooms feature lofts where the children can sleep.

The family pays the bills through a combination of Jack’s real estate practice, income from rental property and government payments for the children who were placed by the county. They have help running the household from two couples who share a guest house.

On an average summer morning, 64-year-old Kay Corrodi is in the kitchen close to sunup--filling seven brown paper lunch bags that she has arranged assembly-line style on a kitchen counter. A line of pegs by the front door is arrayed with tiny sweaters and jackets. The big push is on to get five of the youngest children on the bus for special schools in Santa Monica by 6:45 a.m. Kay grabs the telephone, switches it to intercom, and booms a demand through the house for one last straggler. The tousle-haired 7-year-old arrives, just in time for Jack to twist on a pair of tennis shoes, as the boy grabs a piece of toast and joins the rush for the door. The rush is over in a few minutes, but there will be another push to get five more children ready for the commute to schools or camps up the coast in Malibu.

The kids range from chocolate brown, to olive, to freckly white, but they all call Jack and Kay “Mommy” and “Daddy” and cling and nuzzle around their mother’s waist.

The Corrodis know that some neighbors might consider their pursuit of parenthood obsessive. “Maybe we are,” Jack said with a laugh.

Kay Corrodi said she was happy to give up her real estate career for the sheer pleasure of seeing lives that started off so wrong get better: Like one little 3-year-old who took 14 months just to sit up, but now runs around the home and demands to be taken on a trip to the market. Or Michael, 8, who didn’t respond to light or sound as an infant, but who now slugs home runs at the Malibu T-ball league. Or Amy, 17, who spent her savings taking the entire family to Disneyland, rather than on some typical teen-age fancy. “One of my great joys,” Kay Corrodi says, “is the fact I have such an influence on so many little people and things they will remember all their lives.

“I love to hear one of my little kids say, ‘Look at the sunrise!’ That’s one of the things that thrills me so much.”

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The Beat Today’s centerpiece focuses on a Malibu couple who opened their hearts and home to raise a family that includes 16 foster or adoptive children. For information on how to become a foster parent, call the state Department of Social Services at (800) 735-4984. Adoption information is available from the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services at (213) 738-4577.