Up in the front, prominent family court judges at a massive head table offered words of gratitude Friday to dozens of about-to-happen adoptive families, seated throughout a packed Oncenter conference hall.
In the back — where many women and men were watching on their feet, part of the standing-room-only spillover of a crowd of easily 500 — Eva Mroczek weaved through the pack, an infant who would soon formally become her daughter in her arms, looking for a guy she wanted the chance to thank.
When Eva spotted anyone she knew within the tight Syracuse adoption community — which was a lot of people — she would ask: “Have you seen Kevin Harrigan?”
On one of the biggest of all days for Eva, her husband Janek and their sons, Jakub and Karl — minutes before 11-month-old Zofia officially joined their family — Eva hoped to find the Syracuse lawyer who helped ignite the entire dream.
This was the 5th Judicial District’s 25th annual National Adoption Day celebration in Syracuse, one of the biggest gatherings of its kind on the East Coast, according to Onondaga County Family Court Judge Julie Cecile — doing her final year as co-chair, alongside Oneida County Family Court Judge Paul Deep, before Cecile steps down from that duty.
The featured speakers were Grace and David Johnson, 29, twin children of Diana Johnson and her late husband Dave, of Tully. When organizers were contemplating the right family to spotlight for the 25th anniversary celebration, Cecile and Sherry Kline — another key figure in the planning — were among those who said the Johnsons personify the essence of what it means.
The couple raised 17 children — three are biological and 14, like Grace and David, are adopted. Many found solace after difficult journeys. The twins, for instance, spent their early childhood in an orphanage in Sierra Leone. They were placed through international adoption with a family in Rochester, a situation they said that turned out to be untenable. That led to what David called “a new chance, in a new home.”
When they turned 11, they were adopted with their older sister, Michaela, by Diana and Dave, a longtime Syracuse deputy fire chief. The three children flourished. The twins went on to graduate from Tully High School and SUNY Brockport. Today, they run their own cleaning business and Grace works with girls and boys in crisis situations at the Elmcrest Children’s Center.
They will tell you swiftly about their gratitude for the welcome of their parents and siblings, or the beauty of coming of age beneath the hilltop skies of Tully, or — asked for an absolute favorite memory — the simple delight of sitting down as a family to a knockout meal of their mother’s shepherd’s pie.
Yet the greatest gift they found with the Johnsons is the quality, in the end, that makes all the difference for a child:
“Meaning,” David said.
The lawyer for their adoption? Kevin Harrigan, now retired, a guy who handled almost all the Johnson adoptions — and a guy the family greeted Friday like, well, family.
Harrigan — who speaks of Diana Johnson as “saintly” — arrived with his son Pat, who stepped back and watched as his father was swept up in hugs and handshakes. “It’s hard to wrap your head around what this has become,” said Pat, one of the three sons of Kevin and his wife Denise.
At 78, the white-haired Kevin is a beloved wise guy, ready with a one-liner for almost everyone he sees. Still, it was impossible to miss how quickly tears came to Kevin’s eyes, such as when Beverly Johnson Adams, 55 – who went from a Filipino orphanage to a difficult American placement before finally, at 16, finding a home and a family with the Johnsons — stepped out of the crowd to wrap Harrigan in a fierce embrace.
“This means the world to him,” said Pat, his voice cracking.
Kline — a paralegal who was also honored Friday, along with Onondaga County adoption supervisor Mary Wesche — said Harrigan was at the event from day one.
She worked with him for decades at Harrigan & Dolan, a family law practice, until Harrigan’s retirement a few years ago. In 2013, Kline and Harrigan were traveling to meet a birth mother on a December day when they stopped abruptly on the Thruway. They joined a group of desperate rescuers who teamed up to pull out National Guard Capt. Tim Neild, trapped in a burning truck — a vehicle that burst into flames less than a minute later.
Kline’s clothes were singed. She and Harrigan were both splattered with mud. They drove on for a meeting with a birth mother, in Albany.
A quarter-century ago, Kline recalls, then-county Family Court Judge Martha Walsh Hood — knowing November was National Adoption Month — wanted to hold a Syracuse celebration. Kline said one of Hood’s first calls was to Harrigan, who represented many parents looking to adopt. He was a key part of the earliest gathering, a kind of founding father for a small event in Hood’s chambers.
The idea exploded. By the late 2010s — always in the week before Thanksgiving — it was packing the main hall at the Oncenter, where the highlight was all the tables lined with family court judges, who joyfully rang bells Friday as they finalized 40 adoptions. The pandemic led to a reset, though the event has regained full momentum and organizers say it might soon need to move from a downstairs Oncenter conference space to the main hall, once again.
Hood is now retired. While she could not be there Friday, Harrigan praised the judge for her vision while downplaying his role. He remembered how his own dad died when Harrigan was a toddler. His mother took Kevin and his older brother Frank and moved in with her parents, who helped fill a painful gap for the kids.
Still, Harrigan said of that experience, once “you get a little taste” of the absence of a parent, you “connect to the idea” that was a driving force in his career:
After becoming a lawyer, he did everything he could to help children — lives disrupted for whatever reason by loss, grief or tumult — to find a home.
He insisted Friday that everyone else should get credit for Adoption Day, and that he no longer has any real role — though, yes, he did donate new basketballs to all 40 children who were adopted Friday, and Kline said he made sure those balls were ready by inflating every one, at his house.
As for Eva Mroczek, she said Harrigan’s kindness — even if he’s now retired — is still affecting lives.
Five years ago, when Eva and her husband took their earliest steps toward adopting a child, Harrigan and Kline were the first people they asked for help. “They were so full of hope,” said Eva, a biology professor. That meeting buoyed the couple through what could sometimes be a long and difficult process, culminating in the moment when Zofia, now almost a year old, came to them as part of a private adoption.
Friday, just after Eva embraced Harrigan, she and her family waited in a short line until they sat across from Family Court Judge Judy Plumley, a meeting that ended with Plumley ringing a bell to make it official: Zofia was formally their daughter.
Harrigan had barely turned away from Eva’s thanks before he stepped into a giant hug from Diana Johnson, who describes Harrigan as “a wonderful friend,” not as a lawyer. She sat at a table with eight of her children and — in the same way as the twins, Grace and David — she received a standing ovation after she offered a brief thanks to the crowd, on behalf of her family.
Diana became a volunteer with New Hope Family Services in 1985, and now serves as an adoption caseworker. “It’s hard to be here without my husband,” Diana said, because Dave was such a central part of everything until she lost him, five years ago, to primary progressive aphasia.
She recalled when they were dating, and they sat in her parents’ home on Onondaga Hill and talked about a family. Diana wanted four children and David six, though in the end they would more than quadruple what Diana, now a great-grandmother, envisioned…
Seventeen girls and boys, she said, each one tied for the best choice their parents ever made.
“I can’t tell you how proud and thankful I am,” Diana said from the dais, “to have these kids.”
The room, for a few hours, held nothing but that feeling. Cecile grew up in a household in which her own parents, Dave and Betty Allen, adopted one child and provided a home for more than 20 foster children — mainly girls and boys who were orphaned refugees from Vietnam — while also hosting exchange students from abroad.
“I was old enough to recognize the importance of family,” she said, “and it didn’t have to be blood-related.”
That was the same lifetime lesson of Rebecca Johnson Rogers, oldest biological child of Diana and Dave. She was only 18 months old when her parents adopted for the first time. A home with many children — and such necessities as, say, scheduling the time for individual showers — was all she knew since the days when she toddled.
It is and was a gift, she said. Sure, it was “a different dynamic” than a typical family, but Rogers said this about her sisters and brothers, adopted or biological: Due above all else to the love, warmth and patience of their parents, her siblings “grew up to be fantastic human beings,” Rebecca said, “and I’m so proud to call them family.”
That same ingredient was present at every table Friday at the Oncenter — personified, for example, by Janice and Jamikkia Myers, whose decision to adopt 6-year-old Jemma was the fourth time the couple added to their family by adoption.
“The most important thing for all of them,” Janice said, “is they know how much we love them.”
Peter Robinson, a Niagara County court officer and a brilliant baritone, described the Syracuse adoption day as so inspiring that he travels there every November to sing “God Bless America” as the event begins.
What Robinson always carries home is how “all these lives changed because someone took the time to love on all these children.” That also defines the life’s work of Kevin Harrigan, who admits that in retirement he still misses one major daily mission, with his job:
“The feeling of helping a child find a family,” Harrigan said. “Well, that’s pretty nice.”
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