FIXATIONS : Spark Plugger : * A mild-mannered 75-year-old Fullerton man makes the circuit with his electricity-crackling Tesla coil.

Just inside the garage, Gary Legel’s wife, Margaret, placidly goes about ironing handkerchiefs and shirts, while mere feet away her husband, pushing a button, causes 4-foot tendrils of purple-blue lightning to shoot about. The air is avulsed with a horrifying raw buzzing, one that, when heard coming from Castle Frankenstein, used to put villagers right off their gruel.

Legel’s Tesla coil, the source of all this disruption, is spread out over three wooden dollies. At the business end of all the thick wiring and industrial-grade switches and transformers is a 4-foot metal coil topped with a large aluminum doughnut, from which the electricity crackles. Being in its proximity makes one feel a queasy kinship with the bugs stuck in those back-yard zappers.

When Legel demonstrates his coil in public, he says, “it can really startle people. I’ve had kids start to cry and all that kind of stuff.”

The mild-mannered 75-year-old electrical and electronics engineer built his first Tesla coil after retiring in 1978, and began doing public demonstrations with them in 1986. The coil is most often recognized as a staple of old monster movie laboratories--Legel’s own coil was used in this season’s opener of “Doogie Howser, M.D.” in which Doogie dreams he’s Dr. Frankenstein. But such coils were once standard equipment in nearly all high school science classes, Legel says.

Meaning, then, that it’s one very useful scientific device?

“No, it’s not really good for much of anything,” Legel admitted. “In the old days it was mainly a curiosity, and that’s what it is now. I think schools had them mostly to inspire students to take up electrical engineering.”

That worked in his case: “I was intrigued with it. In high school, I built crystal radio sets. I’d dive into the refuse barrels at local radio shops to get old batteries and coils and what-not to fool around with. And I told myself, someday I’m going to build (a Tesla coil). But a family comes along, there’s your work and there’s no time. So after I retired, I did it.”

For the past five years he’s put on shows with the coil, demonstrating it before school classes, church groups, amateur radio clubs, senior citizen groups and technical societies. His most recent appearance was at Fullerton’s New Year’s Eve arts and crafts bash, “First Night Fullerton.”

He went public with the sparks, he said, “because I just thought I’d like to share the thing. That and there’s a bit of ham in me. Everybody wants to be somebody and do something useful during his life, something that makes him look different. I started out wanting to be a concert pianist, but I didn’t have it. So I’ve done this.”

Legel has an old-timey sign billing himself as “ ‘Professor’ G.W. Legel, Electrical Wizard and His 1,000,000 Volt Tesla Coil.” The sign harks back to the vaudeville days, he said, when every self-proclaimed expert billed himself as a professor.

In shows, he puts the coil through its paces, creating a variety of eerie spark patterns and using it to wirelessly power fluorescent bulbs he holds in midair. While he’s so engaged, his wife works the controls, putting her in an excellent position to do him in if the mood ever took her.

“She’s very tolerant in letting me do this, because I do think I do it to excess,” Legel said. They’ve made it through 52 years together so far, so he’s not too worried.

There are some tricks he doesn’t do, such as one in which the lightning is allowed to skitter over a person’s skin.

“If you do it right, it won’t hurt you, but I’ll leave that to the younger people,” he says. “I don’t want to damage my heart.”

Legel says there have been several deaths by Tesla coil, including one during a college hazing incident recently in Illinois.

The coil he uses now cost him about $2,500, and he put more than 100 hours of work into it, with nearly an equal time devoted to obtaining its parts. It’s his second coil and considerably smaller than his first, which could only be used outdoors (it sent 10-foot lightning bolts snaking into the air). That enlarged Tesla coil disturbed his neighbors and ruined their TV reception, so he got rid of it and started over.

The neighbors would have really loved the coil’s inventor, Nikola Tesla, who built a 20-million volt coil in 1899 that created 135 foot-long lightning trails. Such God-like feats could only have lent an unsettling credence to Tesla’s other claims, such as the one that he could split the Earth apart like an apple.

Like other members of the TCBA--the Tesla Coil Builder’s Assn., with a quarterly magazine even--Legel considers Tesla, who died in 1943, to be an underrated scientific genius. Tesla’s 1888 electric motor and alternating-current generating systems ushered in the modern electric and industrial age.

Practical applications of the Tesla coil made TV and radio possible, and Tesla’s radio transmitting device preceded Marconi’s. Though the documentation is spotty, it’s claimed that Tesla had demonstrated a system of electrical transmission that allowed him to power 200 lamps from a distance of 25 miles without using wires.

Yet while Thomas Edison--whose direct-current power system proved unworkable compared to Tesla’s--has a room devoted to him at the Smithsonian, Tesla is scarcely mentioned in the museum. According to conspiracy theorists, of which Tesla has many, there was a plot to discredit him by big business, which wanted to crush his theories of wireless, or even free, electricity. They maintain that some of his greatest discoveries still sit locked away by the government.

But then Tesla’s credibility was scarcely assisted by his own claims that he’d been receiving extraterrestrial radio communications and that he had devised a death ray. As much as Legel feels Tesla has been snubbed by history, he thinks the conspiracy theories are “a lot of conjecture from a bunch of pseudo-Tesla enthusiasts wanting to get in the limelight.”

Legel is planning on getting out of the limelight himself. He’s not scheduling any more large shows, and is planning on selling his coil. He’s building a still-smaller one to keep around just for fun.

“Maybe I’ll still do it sometimes for real small groups, like a classroom, with the small coil. But I’ve got to catch up on the other things I should be doing,” he says. “Tesla coil builders neglect their shrubs, their grass, their family and things like that. I want to do those things now.”