‘Oh, she was gored that day,’ Abernathy recalled.

The new president of the Highland Park Chamber of Commerce wore a tuxedo to her installation a few weeks ago at Glendale’s staid Verdugo Club.

But she wore jeans and a white cotton shirt to her 68th birthday party Tuesday at Highland Park’s only French Provincial restaurant. Charline Abernathy celebrated on the job, tipping wine glasses with the regulars of the restaurant she opened three years ago after tiring of the quiet joys of gardening on her one-acre Highland Park estate.

Abernathy came out of retirement with a heady agenda. She wants to breathe some fire into the community she’d watched turn lackluster over the past 25 years. She’s planning a jazz concert and is producing a film called “Highland Park, L.A.’s Hidden Treasure.”

Definitely banished from her list of things to do, however, is to grow overstuffed.

Abernathy has been setting her own rules in life too long to get caught up in matters of petty form. Slight of body, sturdy of voice, her graying hair cut short and brushed to the side, she bounced through her dual routine Tuesday evening as maitre d’hotel and birthday girl.

She took time out to sit down with me and recount the incongruous twists of fancy that brought her to be a patron of French cuisine in a community whose primary metiers are Mexican, Chinese and fast-food.

The tale begins, in Abernathy’s words, “way the hell back” in the 1950s. As a recent Los Angeles transplant she made a trip to Tijuana to see Pat McCormick, the American woman and fellow Texan who was breaking both the sex and color lines in the macho sport of bullfighting.

“Oh, she was gored that day,” Abernathy recalled. “I wasn’t prepared for that. The bull that she was fighting was blind in one eye. He just turned on her and got the back of her thigh. She hung in there, killed that bull. It was so courageous. It just touched something in me.”

Abernathy joined Los Aficionados de Los Angeles. She went on excursions to festivals at the breeding ranches of Mexico.

She saw a famous matador return to the ring from retirement. He fought from horseback, a concession to the waning of his power. She understood his motive.

“The excitement is gone, the people are gone,” Abernathy said of the bullfighter’s retirement. “You’ve got to pay for your own drinks.”

Abernathy studied under experts. Eventually she founded an academy on La Brea Avenue, near Melrose Avenue. Many of her students were women.

She organized Sunday festival fights in Tijuana’s downtown ring. The festival was an avenue for the beginner to engage in nearly the real thing.

“You just simulate killing the bull,” Abernathy said. “We had a lot of girls in the festival fights. It didn’t seem proper to kill the bull.”

Abernathy never did kill one.

“I never wanted to,” she said.

Life magazine covered one of the festivals in its Spanish-language edition. A British daily and an L.A. girlie magazine covered the story in English. Abernathy has lost the clips.

“All my clips,” she mumbled, and momentarily couldn’t go on. In her move to Highland Park she had put them in boxes in her basement. It rained, the basement leaked, and that portion of her life was expunged, leaving her almost without an excuse for the frivolity of it.

“Damn it,” she said. “It’s just something you want to do, and you do it.”

She became a contractor, running a crew that cleared away construction debris. In time, her trade made her useful to the Highland Park Ebell Club, a women’s philanthropic group that holds forth in the French country revival buildings on Avenue 57.

The club’s main structure, dating from 1912, had its clerestory windows plastered over and its foyer redone in a Diamond Jim style of tufted red leather and mirrors.

Abernathy volunteered to restore it for submission as a cultural monument. In gratitude, the Ebell made her an honorary board member. When the restaurant concessionaire in its 1938 kitchen building went out of business, the club turned to Abernathy.

“The ladies of the Ebell said, ‘Would you take it on?’ ” Abernathy accepted.

“It was a moment of total insanity,” she said. She knew nothing about the food business.

“I was lucky,” she said. “I got a really good chef. It just happened. A friend of mine called and said, ‘Hey, I got a chef for you.’ ”

At that point in the story, Abernathy had taken to calling me “dear” and asked my birth sign. She approved.

“We have the same characteristics, dear,” she said. “You’ve got that enthusiasm that fire sign people have--ideas, goals, energy. Go out and conquer the world. You can’t harness them yet. It takes a few years. Then you get them harnessed and say, ‘Here’s where they’re going.’

“By then, of course, you’re not as strong as you were. That’s all right. You’ve still got more than most people ever have.”

Abernathy, you could say, is fighting the bull from horseback. But she’ll probably never have to buy her own drinks.