A New Life Dawns After Her Close Call

On her 33rd birthday, her fiance broke off their engagement.

At the junior high school where she works as a teacher, she counseled seven students who had contemplated suicide.

“It’s been a tough year,” Linda Victor says.

She says this with a smile, having acquired a certain perspective. She knows she’s better off without that old boyfriend. And though counseling troubled adolescents can be frustrating, it’s far better than attending their funerals, as she had done the year before.

And now, because she came so very close to attending her own, Linda Victor, one of the luckiest survivors of the earthquake disaster at the Northridge Meadows Apartments, says she can’t help but be optimistic.

“I don’t think people know what life has to offer,” she says. “There’s so much you can do--and I’m here to do it.”

It’s strange how life works out. For a week or so, Linda Victor didn’t want to talk to anybody but family and friends about her ordeal. Now she is effusive, sharing a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings and photographs of the ruins where 16 of her neighbors died.

She refers to a graphic of the apartment that appeared in The Times. “That was my apartment,” she says, pointing to apartment No. 126.

The three closest units are No. 127, No. 124 and No. 123. The residents in each were killed, trapped in the collapse of the three-story structure. Linda Victor’s apartment was as flattened as theirs, yet she emerged with only a small cut on her left leg. “It’s healed already,” she says.

How did Linda Victor survive? Even she still wonders.

She woke up with a bed moving like a roller coaster. Linda, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, thought of running for the door but the motion was too violent. She was on her knees, riding the bed in the darkness. Suddenly she felt herself choking, unable to breathe. Why, she isn’t sure. Then something hit her on the head. What, she isn’t sure. Then she was outside in the frigid night air, wearing only a T-shirt and underwear. How she got there, she isn’t sure.

There are some phenomena that may be fathomed only in retrospect, and even then it’s just guesswork. Perhaps she was choking on dust and plaster--or was it the sensation of the walls and ceiling closing in? Was she struck by a lamp, a book--or the ceiling itself? There is little doubt that she escaped through a window. The earthquake itself, it seems, pitched her toward the opening just as the walls collapsed.

The ceiling now rests flat on her bed. The window that provided her escape is now a tiny opening in the wreckage.

Dazed and shivering, she joined other survivors. She could hear the cries of neighbors trapped inside--”Help me! Please, help me!” She worried, especially, about Ruth Wilhelm, the lonely widow who lived next door in No. 127 with whom she had formed a neighborly friendship.

“She was really nice. She was widowed last year. She was a lonely lady.”

Many victims would die of suffocation, crushed in their beds.

Linda Victor remembers a girl named Sharon who lived on the second floor. Sharon had climbed onto her balcony. “I could reach up and help her down,” Linda recalls. “Later it hit me. I could reach her because the people below were crushed.”

It was a few hours before Linda’s parents would find her. Their own home, the home Linda grew up in, incurred the kind of damage that seems typical--fallen walls, chimney damage, broken plumbing. “It took two days just to pick up things so you could walk around that house,” she says.

Only later would Linda think about her material losses. Firefighters retrieved a TV, a VCR, a lamp, some clothes. But the old blue Cadillac her father had given her was crushed. The English teacher who collected 3,000 books, including “everything Somerset Maugham ever wrote,” was left with none. The kitchen whiz lost valuable cooking ware and dozens of cookbooks. She’ll never be able to replace the vase that a friend had given her while traveling in Russia.

There is something else she hasn’t recovered--a small item she’d picked up the day before the quake. Linda Victor thought it might spruce up the place and help her out of her funk.

“I had really hit a low point, with all this suicide counseling, after the holidays,” she recalls. “The kids would tell me horrible stories, really tragic.” Linda Victor was thinking about a new career--or at least a new school. “I just knew I needed a change.”

To cheer herself up she bought some welcome mats.

“I was so excited,” she says, laughing now at the thought. “I had just put them out.”

So now Linda Victor thinks of the possibilities. She could travel. Maybe she’ll leave Southern California. Perhaps a new career. She has always thought it would be nice to have her own bakery . . .

But before the possibilities come the responsibilities. And last Thursday, as classes resumed at San Fernando Middle School, she was back in the usual classroom, back to being “Miss Victor.”

A few students already knew her story: “I saw you on the news, Miss Victor!”

Among the first chores for teachers was to remind students of the earthquake drill--that students should duck under their desks for protection. Miss Victor warned her first period class that she, for one, would go outside.

Only a few minutes later, an aftershock measuring above 4.0 put everybody to the test.

Linda Victor, as promised, went out the door.

But, she adds with a smile, it wasn’t as if she panicked.

“I walked smoothly.”