One BIG, Happy Family

Colette and Ken Santucci could teach today’s parents a thing or two about happiness and perspective.

First, don’t whine about laundry until you knock down 35 loads a week.

Second, don’t wince at a family road trip until you’ve vacationed with 12 of your 16 children -- in a VW bus.

“It wasn’t that bad,” Colette insists of the camping journey to Tahoe in 1973. Adds Ken: “But we did stop at a lot of laundromats to wash cloth diapers.”

About all you’ll hear the Santuccis of Long Beach complain about -- more as wistful regret than rant -- is that their entire brood so rarely gets to gather.

They did Saturday, however -- for the first time in 25 years. All 16 kids were in Long Beach for their parents’ 50th anniversary party, where they dined with great relief on catered Italian instead of their childhood staple, ground beef.

The couple’s 10 sons and six daughters -- ages 26 to 49 -- watched Ken and Colette renew their wedding vows at St. Bartholomew Catholic Church at the end of the evening Mass. The kids, plus friends who moved in with the family or were unofficially adopted, filled the chapel and followed the priest’s lead in a standing ovation.

“Both my brothers beside me were crying with me,” said Anna Santucci, 49, referring to siblings Nos. 4 and 7. “I’m No. 1. I was conceived on their wedding night.”

After the ceremony, the couple walked arm in arm -- unflappable Colette limping slightly on a broken foot enclosed in a boxy black splint -- into the church hall as a slide show of the couple’s life ran.

Well known in their Belmont Shore neighborhood near St. Bart’s, the Santucci parents insist that raising 16 children was no big deal -- theirs being simply an ordinary family of extraordinary size.

“All kids grow up about the same,” Colette, 70, said with a shrug. “There were just a lot more of them doing it in one place here.”

That meant, over the years, 16 pairs of tennies to locate before school, 16 lunches to pack, 16 sports schedules to follow, 16 scout uniforms to launder and sew badges on, 16 musical instruments to load into the family’s one car for lessons. And of course, cloth diapers for 16 babies.

“We did four to six loads a day, two of them just diapers,” Colette said.

“We could have done an ad for Maytag, because our machine lasted over 20 years,” added Ken, 72. “We’re only on our second Maytag in 50 years. You never came into this house when the washer and dryer weren’t running.”

Seated beside each other in weathered wing chairs, the Santuccis still light up as they talk about their life together in their boxy peach stucco home on a tree-lined street near Woodrow Wilson High School.

They laugh about how their stairs remain unfinished after more than 30 years, how they have to-do lists older than some of their kids.

Books and dishes spill out of makeshift shelving, and the scuffed wood floor needs a shine. Religious icons and comfy, well-worn sofas furnish the home, where curtain rods create closets or privacy.

A sign in their entry hall sums up how they’ve kept their wits and wit:

“When you go to bed each night, give your troubles to God -- he’ll be up all night anyway.”

The story of how the couple fell in love 50 years ago could be out of a movie.

Ken had just graduated from New York’s Manhattan University and in June 1955 was recruited to work as an electrical engineer for North American Aviation in Downey. He and his male engineer pals liked to watch the female employees walk down the hall during each morning’s coffee break.

“The first time I saw Colette, here was this absolutely gorgeous girl, with long dark hair, hips swaying,” Ken recalled with a big grin.

“She had the most beautiful face I’d seen in my 22 years. My buddies thought I’d gone crazy. I’d been a lifeguard and seen a lot of good-looking girls, but she was something.”

One night soon after, Ken was putting an old Army blanket on his 1930 roadster outside his apartment building down on the Long Beach peninsula when who walked up but Colette, who was there to tour an upstairs apartment.

That weekend, he and a buddy were invited to dinner with a new neighbor, Colette.

“Her side of the story,” Ken laughs, “is that she saw this funny-looking little man putting a blanket on his car and didn’t think much more, but after talking to me for several hours at that dinner, thought, ‘This is the man I’ll marry. But the first thing I’ll do is have that front tooth of his fixed.’ ”

That never happened.

But they married anyway, in June 1956, and their first child, Anna, was born in February 1957. They had seen the original “Cheaper by the Dozen” movie, they said, and decided they wanted their own 12 kids. The four others were just “bonus gifts,” said Ken, the eldest of four children.

“I’m the third-oldest of 10 kids, so I knew what I was getting into,” said Colette, who now has 21 grandchildren.

Colette graduated from high school as her youngest sibling was born, an experience her own older children later experienced.

The family moved around Southern California in the early years, following Ken’s work in aerospace. They settled at their current home on Elko Street in 1962 when there were five kids in four bedrooms and two bathrooms, which seemed almost roomy.

In 1963, Ken started at Douglas Aircraft, which evolved into McDonnell Douglas and finally Boeing. The same year, Colette was critically injured in a car crash while six months pregnant with her sixth child, Frank. She spent the rest of her pregnancy bedridden, and a housekeeper was hired.

Colette recovered, and went on to have 10 more children.

As the family grew, the Santuccis looked into buying a bigger house but could not afford it. They got approvals for a second-floor addition, but the construction bid, too, was beyond their means. One day in 1972, Ken came home to find several of his 11 children and his father, a carpenter, on what remained of the roof, armed with shovels.

As with most projects at the Santucci homestead, their addition of five bedrooms and a bathroom was do-it-yourself and learn-as-you-go. This meant that children were erecting walls and Colette was nailing tar paper and even doing the roofing while pregnant. She was pregnant during a second car crash that injured her back, but that was just a day before Rebecca, her last child, was born.

She was pregnant at many of her older children’s high school graduations. She had no twins or triplets, so she was pregnant, in fact, almost every year for more than two decades.

“She was pregnant with my youngest sibling, Rebecca, when I was pregnant with my oldest child,” said Susie Heffron, 47, of Riverside, Santucci child No. 2.

In order of birth, oldest to youngest, the Santucci children are: Anna, Susie, Ken, Patrick, Theresa, Frank, Paul, Monica, Chris, David, Peter, Jerome, Mark, Anastasia, Gregory, Rebecca.

Some are teachers, among them a Korean-language expert and a musical instructor. One is a master mechanic at Federal Express. They include an electrical engineer, a medical researcher at UC Irvine, a real estate broker and a New York bond-investment executive.

Four children -- including Anastasia, called Stacy, who has Down syndrome -- now live at the Elko house. All the kids, Stacy among them, attended college and almost all graduated, some with multiple degrees.

They talk of a childhood where they didn’t always get one-on-one time with their parents but always felt loved. Their engineer father had chore lists posted on the refrigerator, and when their mother starting working part time, the children took over most of the cooking. Hence the rotating ground beef du jour (tacos, stroganoff, sloppy Joes, burgers, spaghetti).

“Eight years old was the magic age,” said Jerome Santucci, 33. “You got a watch and a knife at your dinner setting, and you went on the list of chores. So you now had privileges and responsibilities.”

The kids remember patience, feeling important to their parents and -- astonishingly, to some -- feeling like individuals even in a noisy house with big personalities.

They had only one car, the VW bus, so Dad Ken bicycled to work near Long Beach Airport. Which is how -- on July 20, 1989 -- he got tossed into the street and run over by a bus. Three months in the hospital, three months at home and he was back on the job at Boeing, where he worked as an electrical engineer until he retired -- with four kids still at home -- in 2003.

They had a house full of best friends, where there were too many people to hold a grudge long. They had plenty of outings; they were just inexpensive ones. They took free swim lessons five mornings a week at the Colorado Lagoon and swam at the nearby public pool and beach.

“We had a routine,” Heffron said, “of who was bathing or helping the younger ones or who was making lunches or who was starting the towels in the washing machine, who was dressing the kids after they came out of the bathtub. I have this image in my mind of taking the younger ones up to Mom and Dad’s bed to be dressed after the shower.

“And my mom was usually taking care of the babies,” Heffron said, “but we helped take care of each other.”

That allowed the parents to help others outside the Santucci family, a fact that their children say they remain a bit awed by. Colette was PTA president at one of the schools when she had 14 kids, and a Scout leader off and on for three decades, as was Ken.

“They still to this day help other people,” Heffron said.

What gets David Santucci, the Huntington Beach real estate broker and child No. 10, is that his parents have kept their own romance alive amid all those children and over so many decades.

“Here we are 50 years later, and they are just as much in love as the day they met,” he said. “I can see the spark of love twinkling in their eyes when they’re dancing together.”