STARTING OVER: Two families after the quake : Quake Victims Hold Onto Part of Life as It Was : Whittier Couple Opt Against Starting Over From Scratch

Everything was set. The Ward house--the beautiful, two-story, 67-year-old brick-and-stucco home ripped to shreds by last October’s Whittier earthquake--was going to be torn down. All the engineers said it had to happen. The first floor, built mostly of hollow clay tile bricks, was like a broken back. Dennis Ward picked a demolition contractor and was about to schedule the job.

His wife, Lynn, so attached to the house that it had become like another child, resigned herself to the loss. Ever since the quake she had dreaded this moment. Just to give herself a pat of comfort, she called her cousin, Jim McGlothlin, a Venice architect.

“I just wanted him to come out and put his arm around me and say, ‘Yes, Lynn, it has to go,’ ” she said.

Plan Questioned

Instead, McGlothlin said, “What makes you think it has to come down?”

“Because all the engineers we’ve had look at it say so,” Lynn Ward answered.

“Are you talking to the right people?” McGlothlin asked.

“I don’t know who the right people are,” she said with some of the exasperation that comes from living with four months of anguished uncertainty.

“Give me three days,” McGlothlin said.

And with that, the lives of the Wards, so sluggish ever since their house wobbled and cracked in a thousand places, began to turn around.

McGlothlin had worked on the restoration of damaged old buildings, and he had attended a seminar where one of the speakers was John Kariotis, one of the nation’s leading seismic engineers. He called him. Through Kariotis, McGlothlin found Richard Jasper, a Pasadena engineer who specializes in figuring out how to stabilize and restore commercial buildings. And through Jasper, McGlothlin found Dan Freleaux and Paul McKelvey, two young contractors with the same specialty.

They all scoped out the Ward house and were convinced that despite the massive damage--the destruction of entire chunks of walls and the movement of the house off its foundation--it could be saved.

Dennis and Lynn Ward, who make a living working side by side as brokers in a local real estate office, were relieved to hear someone tell them this. Not merely because of their love for the 3,000-square-foot home that they had painstakingly cared for since 1976, but because they were in no position to afford to duplicate it.

No Earthquake Insurance

The Wards had no earthquake insurance and were able to borrow only the maximum $100,000 from the federal government under the low-interest disaster loan program. That wasn’t enough to build anything near the size of their old home on their twin lots on Beverly Boulevard.

So it is with unbridled relief and a strange new emotion--optimism--that they have moved through life after the preliminary salvation work began a week and a half ago.

“I mowed my lawn yesterday for the first time since the earthquake,” Dennis Ward grinned last week.

Lynn Ward put on her gloves and plunged back into her garden.

“I feel so much better trying to save it,” she said last week inside the chilly house, now full of floor-to-ceiling slabs of lumber that have been nailed together throughout the first floor to protect the home against subsequent earthquakes. “If we hadn’t tried, we always would have wondered whether we should have.”

There’s just one problem with the restoration plan: There’s no hard proof it will work. Before the job can go forward, the Wards’ contractors are going to have to persuade Whittier city building officials, who issue renovation permits, that the house will eventually come up to earthquake standards.

The sticking point is the hollow clay bricks that were used by the home’s original builder for most of the ground floor’s walls. The bricks are wonderful for insulation, but they are not permitted in new construction because they crumble easily during an earthquake.

What engineer Jasper will try to prove to city officials during the next several weeks is that if workmen remove the fractured tiles, replace them with concrete blocks and re-stucco the house, it will be satisfactorily secure--even though some undamaged hollow-tile bricks will remain in the walls.

‘Out on the Edge’

“The problem is that our engineering codes assign no structural value for hollow brick,” Jasper said. “There has been a joint American-Yugoslavian study of it because they use a lot of this brick there . . . but we’re kind of out on the edge.”

The engineer, the architect and the contractor discussed things like roof diaphragms and stress values in the home’s kitchen, which is at the back of the house and looks reasonably well preserved. The Wards listened.

“We’re gambling,” Lynn Ward said.

“I think we’ve got an 80% to 90% chance that it’s going to work,” Dennis Ward said. “The city has been good about working with us. The odds are good.”

The job will be designed to meet the Wards’ $100,000 budget, but that may force them to go cheap on some niceties.

“You’re probably going to get to live with some carpeting you’d rather replace,” Jasper said with an empathic smile.

Dennis Ward, who often tries to comfort himself with the thought that at least he and his wife were not killed or injured when the house collapsed with them inside it, smiled back.

“It’s amazing how the meanings of words can change when you go through something like this,” he said. “What used to be a major problem is now a cosmetic problem.”

Jasper said he figured it would take five or six months to design a plan to restore the house. McKelvey said it would take another four to six months to carry it out.

In other words, somebody said, about a year.

Lynn Ward, leaning against her kitchen sink, shuddered.

Living With Friends

“You just lost me,” she said, forcing a grin. It wasn’t that she hadn’t heard these numbers before. It was just that the thought of having to live in limbo for so much longer was repulsive. Ever since the quake, the Wards had lived with friends in another section of Whittier. They slept in a spare bedroom. Last month those friends moved, and other friends, who live across the street from the Ward home, took them in.

In this sort of help, the Wards have been wealthy. Dennis Ward’s professional connections helped him get an early line on the complex process of applying for federal aid. The Wards’ real estate colleagues, aware that they had only a few thousand dollars in the bank, quickly put together a fund-raising drive that drew contributions from hundreds of people, many of them strangers, netting $7,000. And finally there was Lynn Ward’s cousin, McGlothlin, steering her and her husband to a network of specialists who wanted to take a chance on restoring their home.

“I took this personally,” McGlothlin said. “I love this house. I’d had a lot of good times here.”