Jim Langford had a plan for happiness. Happily, it failed.
The plan centered on a farm in Indiana. It was a place with room to stretch the legs and the unbroken quiet he needed to let his mind gallop, a place to read and write and meditate.
Langford — father of two grown sons, longtime director of the University of Notre Dame Press, professor in arts and letters — was ready for a little peace.
But as he stood at the exit ramp from the rat race, he made one unlikely decision. Then another.
And before he could even murmur the word “retreat,” his ideal of the serene life was being jostled to pieces by a football sensation named Chris Zorich, a best-selling author named Alex Kotlowitz, a taciturn farmer named Elson Fish and, most of all, an unstintingly cheerful little boy named Trevor.
Now Langford is a new father all over again. His farm has been transformed into a day camp for inner-city kids and his reveries can be measured in nanoseconds.
“All this stuff, it’s like one big conspiracy,” he says. “I’m playing a role in it, and I’m loving it, but I don’t feel I should take credit for it.”
But if it isn’t his plan, then whose is it?
Langford has a theory, a theory he has worked out by writing about other people’s lives in the recently released book, “Happy Are They” (Triumph Books). The title is taken from the beatitudes, a series of biblical teachings attributed to Jesus, such as these from the “Jerusalem Bible” translation of Matthew’s gospel: “Happy (are) the gentle: they shall have the earth for their heritage,” and “Happy (are) the peacemakers: they shall be called the sons of God.”
Langford’s theory is that the beatitudes are not archaic riddles, or some reverse-Faustian bargain of sacrificing this life for joy in another world, but a straightforward plan for happiness here and now.
Six years ago, however, he had no inkling of that theory, and no particular interest in the beatitudes. He was not driven, at least not consciously, by tenets of faith.
He had just decided, with his wife, Jill, that with both his boys grown, maybe it was time to adopt a child.
Enter Chris Zorich
They were interested in adopting a biracial child, having read that those children were harder to place with families. Uncertain of whether that would be in the best interests of the child, however, Langford decided to consult a student of his, Chris Zorich.
Zorich, son of a Yugoslavian mother and a black father, had grown up on the South Side of Chicago. He was a doggedly determined student, and at 6 feet, 1 inch and 277 pounds, a ferocious defensive lineman destined for the NFL where he now plays for the Bears.
All of this helped bring him to Notre Dame, and ultimately to Jim Langford’s book publishing class, at just the moment Langford was making his big decision. So professor invited student over for dinner, and began quizzing him.
“I was a little nervous,” Zorich recalls. “I didn’t know if this is how they failed you at Notre Dame, or what.”
“But when they told me he what it was about, I was honored. Adopting a child is one very large responsibility, but it’s an even larger responsibility when you’re adopting a child who is not of your race.”
Langford remembers Zorich speaking eloquently about his life.
“He talked about how he never felt fully accepted by either (black or white) community,” Langford says. “He talked about how hard it was for his mother. And at the end of the evening, he said he wouldn’t change a thing even if he could.
“Wow. What more do you need to hear?”
So the Langfords adopted Trevor, a 7-week-old boy of mixed racial heritage with some developmental disabilities, a boy who Jim Langford calls “one of the happiest kids you will ever meet,” along with “gorgeous,” “marvelous” and a few other adjectives not unknown to new parents. Zorich became Trevor’s godfather.
Three years later, the Langfords adopted another biracial child, an infant named Emily, who rates similar assessments from her father.
Zorich is her godfather, too, and a frequent visitor in the Langford house, where he says he has found kindred spirits in Jim and Jill.
Though toddlers are not a typical feature of the writer’s aerie, it is conceivable that the Langfords still could have retired peacefully to the farm they had purchased outside South Bend, Ind.
But by then, Langford was under the thrall of a book he had begun to teach in some of his classes — “There Are No Children Here,” the heart-rending account of life in public housing in Chicago, written by Oak Park author Kotlowitz, published in 1991. As a publisher and author himself, Langford should not have been surprised that a book could change somebody’s life, but he was.
So he and his wife made plans to convert their acreage into a combination of playing fields and woodland park that they would make available to groups of inner-city kids, a place where the kids could, at least for a day, be in nature and out of harm’s way.
Turning of the tide
Their neighbors, however, were not as enthusiastic. A petition was circulated to block the plan, and the Langfords grew so discouraged that they had decided to sell the place.
Then, one night, there was a knock at the door. Outside stood a neighbor, Elson Fish, who had lived on adjacent land for more than 40 years. Fish, who had hardly spoken to the Langfords since they bought their lot, explained that he had been approached with the petition. It troubled him. He and his wife, Patsy, conservative Christians, had prayed for several nights over the matter, and decided that the Langfords were doing God’s work.
Elson Fish’s visit turned the local political tide, and convinced the Langfords to stay. For Jim, it did something else: “I saw faith in action in a very real way, and I began to think about it.”
As he began to organize the camp, now incorporated as There Are Children Here, Langford began to see something in common among Zorich — who balances his time between the Bears, his charitable foundation and Trevor — and myriad other people who do what they believe is right. They are all happy — happy far beyond what the bumps and strains of their daily life might seem to offer.
That led to “Happy Are They,” which profiles 11 people who have devoted themselves to service, including Zorich and another Chicagoan, Pilsen community organizer Raul Raymundo.
The two Chicago profiles were written by Langford’s co-author and son (and Zorich’s Notre Dame classmate) Jeremy, 26, who is an editor at Chicago’s Loyola Press. Jeremy Langford made waves in the publishing world last fall when he acquired and edited Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s last work, the posthumous best seller “The Gift of Peace.” But that is another story, in a family that has more than its fair share of stories.
Jim Langford’s story brings him to the summer of 1997, which has seen the release of “Happy Are They” and the first full-time operation of There Are Children Here. More than 200 kids traipsed across his land during a 10-day stretch earlier this month.
“You reach down almost automatically when you are walking, and both your hands are quickly taken,” says Langford. “Whatever is going on inside of them, it radiates from them that something is really moving them. . . . By the end of the day, you have at least a few who ask, `Will you be my daddy?’
“It exceeds any dream I ever had,” he admits, “of how curative it would be to have some time to myself.”
