Opening Home and Heart

In 1985, a 5-year-old Mexican girl was orphaned by a devastating earthquake in Mexico City. Two years later, she was adopted together with her three sisters by a family in La Canada Flintridge, and on New Year’s Day 1988, she watched proudly as her oldest sister represented their native land on the Red Cross float in the Tournament of Roses.

On Friday, that little girl, 18 now, will ride in the 1999 Rose Parade--as a princess in the Rose Queen’s Royal Court.

Yvonne Bisgaard, now a senior at La Canada High School, is one of six young women chosen from 801 hopefuls.

“It’s the finishing touch to a fairy tale,” says Constance Towers Gavin, an actress who appears as a wicked woman on the soap opera “General Hospital” but who, in this story, is the fairy godmother.

The story began in March 1986 when Chris Bisgaard, a prosperous attorney in L.A., and his wife, Sharon, read a news story about Project Connie. Under the program, Gavin, wife of then-ambassador to Mexico John Gavin, hoped to find adoptive homes for youngsters orphaned by the earthquake, which had taken more than 6,000 lives.

The Bisgaards were particularly touched by the plight of the Torres Mendoza children and by Constance Gavin’s pledge to their father, Jorge, who was dying of leukemia at 35. He had sought her out and begged her to use her influence to keep his girls together and find a home for them in the United States. She promised to do her best.

Goals Set Aside to Make Room for the Girls

Then in their late 30s, the Bisgaards had a 14-year-old son, Christopher, and a 13-year-old daughter, Lara. Soon Chris and Sharon would have been empty-nesters, free to travel, to pursue personal goals long deferred (in Sharon’s case, getting a master’s in social work and resuming the career she’d put on hold). But they always had wanted more children. They had love to share, not to mention a spacious home with a pool and a guest house.

“The Bisgaards were everything, if not more, that I had dreamed of finding,” Gavin said at the time.

The adoption process was to be beset with obstacles placed by the Mexican government, which generally is reluctant to have children adopted out of the country. But by Christmas 1986, Gavin was able to bring the girls--12-year-old Claudia, 10-year-old Sandra, 6-year-old Yvonne and 2-year-old Jennifer--for a holiday visit with the Bisgaards.

The following April, the Bisgaards flew to Mexico City, where the girls were boarders at a convent school. Chris and Sharon signed the papers and brought the girls home with them.

Yvonne, now 18, recalls with a laugh that when that she first saw her new home in La Canada Flintridge, “it was so big!” She thought it was a government building. The only home the girls had known was a one-room apartment at the end of an alley; it had been the best that Jorge, a blue-collar worker, and his wife, Arcelia, a cleaning woman, could provide.

The girls had shared a bed with their parents. There was no running water. The bathtubs at the Bisgaards’ were such a novelty that a second water heater had to be installed to accommodate the girls’ penchant for multiple daily baths.

Still, the melding of the Torres Mendoza and Bisgaard clans seemed fraught with peril. Here were young children who’d lost both parents and been transported by a strange new mama and papa to a strange home in a strange land. The emotional wrenching was particularly hard for Claudia, who’d had to face the horror of identifying her mother’s body in the earthquake rubble and then had become de facto mother to her siblings.

But the Bisgaards were determined to make it work.

Language was a basic problem. The girls spoke no English, and the Bisgaards had only the Spanish they’d picked up in school, which they hadn’t tested in years.

“I didn’t have a vocabulary of feelings, of the intangible,” Sharon says. “I had ‘brush your teeth,’ ‘sit down,’ ‘be quiet.’ I couldn’t ask them, ‘How are you feeling?’ ‘Are you lonesome?’ ‘Are you sad?’ ”

The language barrier caused a little scare early on when Claudia and Sandra, who’d never had a brother, rebelled at young Christopher’s teasing and came running to Sharon to complain that he “nos esta molestando.”

Imagine Sharon’s horror--until she realized that molestar is the Spanish word for “bother.”

Outside the home loomed the specter of prejudice. How would these girls be accepted in a community that is both affluent and overwhelmingly Caucasian?

Early on, as she shepherded her four little girls, speaking to them in Spanish, blond, blue-eyed Sharon evoked stares aplenty.

“People just could not figure [this] out,” she recalls. Sometimes people would ask, in front of the girls, “Is their father very dark?”

“I don’t know,” Sharon would answer, hiding offense behind a sweet smile. “I never met him.”

But Yvonne says that from the start, “I’ve really felt at home, not like I was different. I don’t think I’ve ever been treated differently from my peers.”

The Bisgaards don’t pretend that it all has been and-they-lived-happily-ever-after. In any family with six children, Sharon says, “you’re going to have rocky times, great times, difficult times. But there has never been a time when [Chris and I] didn’t feel that this was what we should have done, and we’re glad we did it. It’s been incredibly good for our family, and for us.”

“Sharon and I always felt this was meant to be,” Chris adds. “It always felt right. We always felt comfortable with it, even in the hard times.”

He can’t stop smiling at the realization “that my daughter Yvonne”--who came to the Bisgaards as a 6-year-old tomboy, crashing into things in the living room and spilling her food at every meal--”is a Rose Princess. Somehow in the cosmic scheme of things, this was meant to be.”

Everyone Rallies Behind Yvonne

When the Bisgaards do something, it is as a family. Longtime supporters of the Rose Parade, they will occupy seats reserved for Royal Court parents this year. But they have bought 20-plus tickets so other family members and friends can be there to cheer for Yvonne too.

Right now, Chris says, “Yvonne is the center of our universe. When Christopher played football [in college], he was the center of our universe.”

Gavin says the Bisgaards have “what everybody dreams of, something starting to disappear in our society: a family all participating in one of the children’s great moments.”

The whole family was there for Yvonne when the court was announced.

“I just started bawling,” Chris says. “Little Yvonne, with all that she’d been through--it was pretty wonderful.”

Yvonne entered the Rose Queen competition more or less on a fluke, having tagged along with friends who were entering. She says, “Never in a million years, did I think . . .”

Contestants were asked who, besides members of their families, they considered role models.

“Mrs. Gavin,” Yvonne replied without hesitation.

Each was asked to describe the biggest challenge in her life.

“Losing my parents,” Yvonne replied, “being adopted, coming to a new country, a new family.”

And they were asked why they wanted to be in the Royal Court. Yvonne told about her first Rose Parade, seeing Claudia riding on the Red Cross float and falling in love with the event.

The Bisgaard family has expanded considerably since 1987. Son Christopher is 26 now and in his second year at Georgetown University law school. Lara, 25, was married in 1995 to Jay Calder, whom she met at Brigham Young University; they are the parents of Anna Maria Yvonne, 10 months.

Claudia has married Dan Aragon, whom she met while at Dixie College in Utah; they live in Salt Lake City and are the parents of daughters Arcelia, named for Claudia’s late mother, and Cerina. Sandra and husband Craig Queem, whom she met at Ricks College in Idaho, live in Provo, Utah, and have a son, Cooper, 17 months.

With Yvonne off to college next year, only Jennifer will be left at home.

But distances don’t seem to have much effect on the Bisgaards. When Sandra’s baby was born, Chris and Sharon were in the delivery room, and Lara skipped her graduation ceremony at BYU to be there. That’s family.

How have they made it work?

“There were two keys to success,” Chris says. “One was Sharon’s ability to take on this tremendous responsibility and give these girls the love they desperately needed.

“The other was the way Christopher and Lara reacted and didn’t rebel. That allowed Sharon to focus on what she had to focus on.”

“I don’t think I felt any resentment,” Lara says. She does remember her anger one day at being unable to get her mother’s attention by calling “mom”--while the little girls got a response immediately by crying “Mama, Mama!”

“You don’t even speak English anymore!” Lara remembers thinking of her mother. “This is really horrible!”

But she ended up learning Spanish to accommodate her new sisters.

A Homecoming of Sorts in Mexico

Today, neither Yvonne nor Jennifer speaks Spanish. Chris tells of a crew from a Spanish-language TV channel wanting to do “this wonderful story about this little Mexican girl” becoming a Rose Princess, only to learn that she speaks only English.

Indeed, both Yvonne and Jennifer were too young to have many memories of their lives in Mexico. The Bisgaards took the girls to Mexico City in 1992 to celebrate Claudia’s high school graduation and to see aunts, uncles and cousins. For Claudia and Sandra, it was a homecoming, but, Chris says, Yvonne and Jennifer “were just tourists.”

“They were ready to come home,” Sharon adds. “This was home now.”

With their new multicultural family, the Bisgaards started new traditions, such as tamales on Christmas Eve and pin~atas. Mexican food is a staple at the dinner table now. But Jennifer is so Americanized that she hates anything spicy.

Chris and Jennifer recently shared an emotional moment when, with a church group, they took food, clothing and toys to families in Tijuana. Seeing the abject poverty, Chris says, “I couldn’t help thinking this could have been our girls.

“I cannot remember life before having this family,” he adds. “It never even crosses my mind. For the first year or two, there was almost a celebrity status--’Oh, this is so great’--but in time we were just the Bisgaards.”

There were, of course, the costs of educating four more children, of piano lessons, braces, Berlitz courses. . . . And Sharon no longer talks about going back to school.

“I’m too old and too tired after raising these kids,” she says.

But the Bisgaards don’t look at any of this as sacrifice--and anyway, they say, it’s all been compensated by what Sharon calls “the simple joys --going to their chorus concerts, watching them play softball, going to a church program.”

The Bisgaards are devout Mormons, and, Chris says, “to us, family is the most important thing. Just to have this family is such a joy, to have these kids, all six of them.”

As the Rose Parade approaches, Sharon says, people often tell her that Yvonne is “the sweetest, nicest person in the world.” Sharon gets teary with pride but is quick to say, “She came that way. I didn’t do that. I mothered them, but their formative years, their own parents had a major role in that.”

And what does Yvonne think Jorge and Arcelia would say about their child being a Rose Princess?

“I think,” she answers, “they’d be very proud of me, and happy that I’m living a great life.”

Constance Gavin adds that she’s sure Jorge is up there somewhere, saying, “This is even better than I thought it would be.”