Dr. Thora Howard; Friend, Mother to Asian Refugees

Watching the fall of Saigon on television from a New Orleans hotel room in the spring of 1975, Dr. Thora Howard dissolved into tears.

“I saw people frantically trying to get out of the city. I remember one family running down the street with a baby, the agonized look on their faces. . . . Those little kids just tore me up,” Howard told an interviewer several years later.

Nearing 40, never married and yearning to mother someone, she felt a “dreadful compulsion” to help. After returning home to Monterey Park, she canceled her vacation, stocked up on chopsticks and rice bowls and began calling a refugee resettlement hotline.

The process took months, but finally she welcomed to her home the family of a Vietnamese hospital worker. She eventually took in two more Vietnamese families--each with five or six children--providing comfortable suburban shelter, food, education, transportation and thousands of dollars that enabled them to make their own way.

When the families left her, Howard cried, sometimes for days. When the last family moved out in 1979, she decided she could bear no more departures.

That year, Howard, a radiologist at White Memorial Medical Center in Boyle Heights, took in an orphaned Laotian boy who had been sold as a slave to a Vietnamese family. He was followed by seven more children representing various troubled Indochinese outposts.

Howard, 62, stayed in close contact with her adopted families and saw her children--two of whom she legally adopted--grow up and build successful lives. She died after a long illness Tuesday at White Memorial.

“I have never met anyone like her,” said Kim Nguyen, whose family was the last Howard shepherded. “She was a very warm, loving person. She has taught all of us many great lessons of kindness and giving.”

Howard, who is also survived by her father, Everett, two sisters and two nieces, was born in Altadena and earned her undergraduate and medical degrees from Loma Linda University. She arrived at White Memorial in 1963 and worked there until shortly before her death.

A medical liaison for the International Rescue Committee, Howard was not afraid of dealing with people who probably were malnourished or had other health problems. She also told resettlement officials that she wanted a large family with small children. After making the arrangements through a resettlement program at their Seventh-day Adventist church, she and her father drove to Camp Pendleton in September 1975 to pick up their first family.

It was clear from the start that the adjustment--for the Howards and for the refugees--would be difficult. When one of the Vietnamese women entered the Howards’ five-bedroom, three-bathroom hillside home in quiet Monterey Park, she squatted in a corner and cried.

“It was Sunday morning, people in the neighborhood were sleeping in and it was deathly quiet,” Howard recalled in an interview with The Times in 1979. “To her, quiet meant one of two things: curfew or the Viet Cong was about to attack.”

The family, which consisted of a husband, wife, five children and the husband’s father and sister, moved out fairly quickly after the adults found jobs. Over four years, Howard would take in 27 refugees in three families. The children who came later included Cambodians and Laotians, Buddhists and Confucianists, all of whom managed to get along under one roof.

“I’ll look in the rearview mirror,” Howard once said, “and there’s Laos with his head on Cambodia’s shoulder, and Vietnam and China are sleeping with an arm around another.”

Howard’s generosity, Kim Nguyen said, was powered by her faith.

Among the eight children Howard raised are a Carson policeman, a salesman in an import-export business, a nurse, a Loma Linda dental student and a computer-chip entrepreneur preparing his first public stock offering. One of them, Michael Thanh Ly, moved back in with Howard when she grew too ill to take care of herself.

“I wouldn’t have the life I have today without her,” said Ly, an El Monte sewing contractor and father of a 10-year-old girl who plumped up the pillows under Howard’s head every night before she entered the hospital for the last time. “If she wasn’t my mom, I wouldn’t be here today. I look at her like my real mother.”

Howard’s funeral will be at 1 p.m. today at White Memorial Seventh-day Adventist Church, 1720 Cesar Chavez Ave., Los Angeles. Burial will follow at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in Glendale.