PROFILE : Shear Pleasure : Rita Dayton may be found at the Ventura County Fair wearing, spinning, talking up wool.

There are certain people who need to experience life at its source. In our technological age, they might be considered misfits.

One candidate for the title is Rita Dayton, who maintains an alternative lifestyle in suburban Simi Valley. Dayton is a shepherd.

Her operation has the engaging title, From Ewe to You, and she sells lambs for breeding, fleeces, spun wool, elegant knitted socks and sweaters, and spinning wheels.

“It’s amazing how one thing led to another,” Dayton said. “It’s like an obsession or a disease, I guess.”

A full-time teacher at Royal High School in Simi Valley until last year, Dayton worked sheep into her schedule. Until the drought began three years ago, she ran flocks of up to 700 animals, all in Moorpark and Simi Valley, where she could commute to them twice a day.

This week Dayton is on duty at the Ventura County Fair, where she may be found near the livestock exhibits--wearing wool, spinning wool, talking about its merits, and officiating at Saturday night’s down-home style spinning contest.

It was a spinning demonstration at the Fair in 1973 that first launched her hobby. Within days of watching it, she had sent off to New Zealand for a spinning wheel in kit form.

“It had an instruction book with it,” she said, “and there were no classes in the area, so I taught myself.”

And a new way of life began.

Dayton’s heritage is not farming. She grew up in West Berlin, where she found herself embarrassed by a society that had allowed itself to be taken over by Nazi ideology. She applied herself to learning French and English, and to her parents’ dismay, emigrated to Quebec upon graduating from high school in 1955.

“I was one of those people listening to the Voice of America,” she said. “I believed all that. And it really was the way they said--you could leave your doors unlocked then.”

She went to New York the following year, married a machinist and took a job as an inventory clerk in a handbag factory. She determined to become a teacher after hearing President Kennedy’s inaugural message--”Ask not what your country can do for you, . . . “

The family came West to raise their only son in wide open spaces. Dayton enrolled at Cal State Northridge (then called Valley State College). Four years later, in 1966, she had a master’s degree in German and began teaching languages in Simi Valley schools.

She combined the roles of teacher and spinner, giving many spinning lessons over the years, mostly at Pierce College in Woodland Hills.

As soon as she began knitting, she wanted to add color to her designs. But the color had to come from the sheep--she doesn’t use dye. So in the ‘70s she decided to “raise a few animals of my own.”

She chose to breed the Rambouillet sheep because of its fine, long wool. The first couple of years there were just a handful of them. Like pets, each had a name. All of her sheep still do.

Some names are more romantic than others. Dayton has a weakness for Wagnerian opera, so there is a Siegfried and a Brunhilde. But with so many in the flock, she had to start passing out some ordinary names out of necessity.

The breeder knows all of her animals well. She tries to be with each ewe when it lambs; she does her own feeding and nursing, and she castrates the surplus rams. She is up at 4:30 year-round.

“Maybe the one morning you decide to come late is the time they got out, or one has snakebite,” she said.

Over the years, the sheep have given Dayton more than just a living--they have also been responsible for adding two languages to her repertoire. The daytime herders she hired, who were generally from Mexico, taught her Spanish, which she was soon teaching at the high school.

And during sheep research trips to the Pyrenees on the French-Spanish border, she became charmed by the Basque language. It seemed to have no practical use, but she liked the challenge of it.

Then she discovered a Basque settlement in Chino. There she could practice the language on Sundays and still drive home in time to pen up her sheep. Since her divorce in 1977 and her son’s independence shortly thereafter, the visits have become important social events.

“It’s all age groups,” she said. “There’s a family-style lunch--the men play cards after. They have folk dances. It’s very much like being in Europe.”

During the week it is quiet at her leased acreage near the Simi Valley Freeway.

“If the phone doesn’t ring, I go through days when I literally only talk to the sheep,” she said, sounding pleased with the arrangement.

For Dayton, the work of the big herds which she sold for meat is over.

“If prices are just right I figure on making $10 a head, and prices haven’t been right very often,” she said.

She will keep only a few dozen wool animals from now on, and feels the sheep industry in America--down to a quarter of what it was after World War II--is doomed because of foreign imports.

Indeed, sheep are more of a passion than an income for her. It takes every spare moment in the course of a week to knit a pair of high boot socks, which sell for $25. Creating sweaters, which go for over $200, is inefficient.

The answer for most entrepreneurial knitters is the knitting machine.

“I don’t want to do that,” Dayton said. I want a hand-raised sheep, hand-spun wool, and clothes hand knit.”

And so, her profits--at least monetary ones--are illusory. But it’s OK with her.

“Other people spend money going to a psychiatrist or dressing for nice restaurants,” she said. “I spend my money this way, and it comes out the same.”

* WHERE AND WHEN: Rita Dayton and her sheep can be seen at the Ventura County Fair through Aug. 26. The Fair is located at the corner of Harbor Boulevard and Figueroa Street in downtown Ventura. Fair exhibits will be open from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. and the carnival and midway, from 11 a.m. to midnight. General admission is $5, seniors 55 and over and children 6 to 12 pay $2, and children under 5 get in free. On-site parking costs $3.

UP CLOSE: RITA DAYTON

Age: 54

Occupation: Shepherd

Favorite sheep in her flock: Texas. “She is from Texas and that’s her name. She has really fine wool and she lambs every seven or eight months. She’s just real hearty. She’s sort of the boss there. She has this secret code with me. I secretly give her extra treats. She goes behind the barn or stands away from the others and makes eye contact with me or gives one very low baa.”

Fastest she’s ever knitted a pair of socks: One week. “I don’t even finish a pair a month on the average.”

Number of pairs of wool socks she owns: 12. “Some are over 10 years old. When the feet wear out, I just cut them out and make new feet.”