Giving an Assist

Most people would say that Steven Cobin has taken more than his share of hard knocks. His daughter Geri Lisa was born with a birth defect that has left her severely mentally retarded. His son Daryl was killed at 18 in a motorcycle accident. Then came daughter Stephanie’s battle with cancer.

“You get to the point where you’re just shellshocked,” Cobin says. Still, mention the tragedies and he is quick to add: “This is just life. Nobody gets out unscathed. I’ve never felt that life was cruel, only that there are certain moments that were cruel.”

Nevertheless, he says, these tragedies “drive me. Life is short, and I have to do as much as I possibly can while I have the life and the health to do it.”

At 57, Cobin, an executive director for a brokerage firm, isn’t talking about making more money. He has things that money can buy, including a home in Encino.

“It’s always been easy for me to make money,” he says, “but it’s very, very hard to make a difference.”

These days his energy is directed toward Wheels for Humanity, a nonprofit organization based in L.A. that rehabilitates donated wheelchairs and ships them to those in need in countries where a wheelchair--if available at all--might cost a year’s pay.

Cobin has organized the charity’s first fund-raiser, a wine-tasting, buffet, silent auction (of vacation trips and other big-ticket items) and concert with emcee Pat Boone and singer Diane Schuur to be held Friday at the Skirball Cultural Center. And he’s thinking big: He wants to net $100,000.

Until now, he says, “I have always operated by stealth, behind the scenes, offstage, in the wings.” By spearheading this effort, he says he has “unfortunately become visible, and I’m very uncomfortable with that profile.”

But he is devoted to Wheels for Humanity, which he “discovered” a year ago and on whose board he now serves.

“It’s a wonderful organization,” he says. “About 92 cents of every dollar goes straight to the cause.”

There are only two paid staff members. One is executive director David Richard, who founded the organization 2 1/2 years ago. On the phone recently--on the eve of his departure for Vietnam to deliver chairs with a team including a volunteer physical therapist--Richard spoke of Cobin as a savior of sorts for Wheels for Humanity, whose strong suit has never been fund-raising.

Philanthropy was instilled in Cobin at an early age.

“My adolescence was spent watching my mother fight cancer,” he says. “Those years left a profound impression upon me,” a conviction that doing for others, as she did, is important “no matter what your circumstances are.” Despite her illness, she was a B’nai B’rith volunteer, helping the homeless and working on blood drives. She died when she was 49 and he was 21.

“But let’s talk about what emanated from that tragedy,” Cobin says. It seems that in time, his widowed father began dating Florence, a woman with twin daughters. Cobin married one of them, Sue. A year later, his father and Florence were wed.

“I’m married to my stepsister and my children are my nieces and nephews,” Cobin says with a laugh.

Steven and Sue’s first-born was Geri Lisa. It was a normal pregnancy (save for the fact, he says, that he developed an insatiable craving for mushrooms). But the child was born with a hole in her lower back that left her spinal column exposed, a condition called meningomyelocele, a severe form of spina bifida.

Her brain was unable to absorb fluids coursing up the spine and she developed hydrocephalus, an enlarged skull, and suffered damage to the brain.

“We were never able to bring her home,” Cobin says. Now 31, Geri Lisa has “spent every day of her life in a hospital. How she’s lived 31 years is a miracle. Her life expectancy was five years. It’s been one crisis to the next, but she’s a tough old bird and she’s not about to check out.” She is currently at the Fairview Developmental Center in Costa Mesa.

“She doesn’t recognize us and never has, and she does not speak at all. That’s a tragedy,” Cobin says. But he doesn’t dismiss “the joys that come out of the fire of tragedy”--including “18 wonderful years” with Daryl.

Steven and Sue had planned to adopt after having their biological children. Geri Lisa’s situation spurred them to fast forward those plans. About four months after her birth, they adopted infant Daryl. A year and two days after Geri Lisa’s birth, Stephanie was born. And three years later, brother Todd came along.

Then tragedy struck again. On a June night in 1986, four days after his graduation from Birmingham High School in Encino, where he’d been an all-league football player, Daryl was killed when his motorcycle collided with a car near Balboa Park. Cobin, who’d bought the motorcycle for his son over his wife’s objections, was devastated.

The Cobins established the Daryl Cobin Memorial Scholarship Fund at Birmingham to take kids in need of both mentoring and financial aid and to help put them through college. One recipient, Raymond Lew, today is Cobin’s partner at CIBC Oppenheimer.

The Cobins’ lives were shattered again when Stephanie, at 19, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. She recovered, graduated from Northwestern (Cobin’s alma mater) and is now married and the mother of a daughter. Son Todd, now 27, works in Jewish community services at Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s Westside facility.

Cobin had volunteered for Big Brothers and served as president of the L.A. County chapter of the Make-a-Wish Foundation. He was looking for another place to help when someone told him about Wheels for Humanity. “I said, ‘That’s it.’ ”

Because of Geri Lisa, he says, “I know what a wheelchair can do. It not only gives a disabled person mobility, but it gives hope, it gives dignity. A wheelchair is a passport to a better life, at whatever level that life is.”

If Cobin meets his goal of netting $100,000 Friday night (the event is being underwritten by Oppenheimer), he says it would mean “probably 5,000 to 6,000 more wheelchairs” repaired and delivered to countries where polio is still a crippler and people are still getting limbs blown off by land mines.

To date, founder Richard estimates, 2,500 chairs have been distributed in 22 countries.

Until Cobin came along, Richard depended on private donors and small foundations, operating more or less on his theory that “God’s going to give us what we need.” Perhaps, but Cobin wants to give him a little hand to help meet the proposed 1999 budget of $175,000.

“My glass is very full,” Cobin says, “and I enjoy sharing it with as many people as I can.”

The Wheels for Humanity fund-raiser takes place 6:30 p.m. Friday, Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 Sepulveda Blvd; $125; (818) 766-8000.