The Stories of Her Hometown : A former teacher races the clock to finish another of her histories of life in Inglewood

Inglewood’s living memory, Gladys Waddingham, is back at her kitchen table, penning her seventh history--this one about the women of her city.

Rushing against the deadline of her own mortality, the 94-year-old former schoolteacher spends most of her days, and many of her nights, leafing through folders, newspaper clippings and her own diary to work on the book she will dedicate to the memory of her mother.

“When you’re almost 95, you have a different perspective,” Waddingham says, winking. “I’m rushing on this book because I want to finish it.”

A frail, white-haired woman with pale blue eyes, Waddingham was 85 when she started writing books, her second career.

She spent 45 years teaching Spanish at Inglewood High School before retiring in 1967. During her tenure, more than 10,000 students passed through her classroom; she has outlived many of the early ones, including 12-term U.S. Rep. Glenn M. Anderson, who died last year at the age of 81.

During the past decade, Waddingham has chronicled in minute detail nearly every facet of Inglewood’s early history. But what sets her apart from many other civic historians is that Waddingham was there to live it.

Today, Waddingham lives alone in the green, contemporary-style house that her late husband, Francis, designed. She works at her kitchen table within reach of a special telephone for the hard of hearing.

She never learned to type, so she writes everything by hand. The stapled-together pages are typed by the secretary at her church, Dolores Watson, who describes Waddingham’s penmanship as “good unless she falls asleep, and then it kind of dwindles down.”

Waddingham writes the way she talks, simply and with emphasis. She has a penchant for exclamation marks: “It was Mrs. Freeman who signed the lease!” is an example.

No detail is too small to escape her notice. Her book about her years at Inglewood High, for instance, includes an exhaustive appendix of every teacher, student body president, office staffer and yearbook editor at the school from 1905 to 1965.

Waddingham didn’t have to leave her house to do the research. She owns a complete collection of Inglewood High’s yearbooks from 1909 to the mid-1970s.

She also has an eye--and memory--for the telling anecdote. In her autobiography, she recalls being awakened by cries the night her brother was born and thinking someone was killing chickens in the house.

She writes about how she and her family used to eat popcorn with milk like breakfast cereal, and how, as a child, she earned eight cents for every barrel of huckleberries she picked for a neighbor.

Says Christie Miles Bourdet, a member of the Assn. of Historical Societies of Los Angeles County, “She has a very friendly style, as if she were speaking to you.”

Waddingham says she never considered writing a book until leaders at the First Presbyterian Church of Inglewood asked her to write about the church in honor of its 95th birthday.

Waddingham, a church member since 1928, agreed because “it was just something that had to be done.”

Then the Historical Society of Centinela Valley, of which she was a founding member, asked her to write about their activities. Soon after, she wrote “The History of Inglewood,” which has sold more than 1,300 copies. That was followed by “A Kaleidoscope of Memories,” an autobiography of the first 26 years of her life.

She had just finished proofreading “My Memories of Inglewood High” when she set to work on “The Women Who Made Inglewood.”

“I got so tired of all these biographies written about men that end with one sentence: On such and such a day, he married so and so,” Waddingham said.

Although she has written preliminary biographies on many of the women, she is still waiting to receive answers to questionnaires she sent to the women and their relatives before writing the final drafts. She expects to include as many as 300 profiles.

While her books are not big sellers, Waddingham’s authorship has earned her a reputation as Inglewood’s grande dame and city historian. Earlier this year, the city named a lecture hall for her at the Inglewood Public Library. And her body of work was recently honored by the Conference of California Historical Societies.

Hers is an Inglewood of a different era. It is a place of adobes and chinchilla farms, not a complex, modern city. And while the city’s residents regard Waddingham with enormous fondness, honest critics suggest her histories, though charming and quaint, are incomplete.

“I would not condemn her for writing about the Inglewood she knows and loves; she just doesn’t know that much about Inglewood today to write about it,” said City Councilman Garland Hardeman.

Once a largely white enclave, the city’s black and Latino population steadily climbed during the past 30 years so that today, whites make up a tiny fraction of its residents.

What Waddingham’s works lack, Hardeman said, is information on the newer generation of black political players and civic leaders who led Inglewood into the 1990s.

Waddingham politely disagrees, pointing out that she named a chapter of her Inglewood book “White Flight” and another “No Longer ‘Caucasians Only.’ ”

But in fact, those chapters spent so much space documenting everything from heat waves to the construction of parking lots that little room was left for the racial issues promised by the chapter headings.

Still, Waddingham’s fans balk at the suggestion that her writing lacks relevance.

“She’s simply trying to record what she knew,” said Shirley Gottschalk, an administrator at Occidental College who has profiled Waddingham--a 1920 alumna--for the college’s publications. “It wouldn’t be fair to impose on her the values of today’s generation.”

Besides, Waddingham’s actions speak for themselves.

She and her husband, who had no children of their own, helped raise a Brazilian girl who attended Inglewood High. When their white neighbors began fleeing the city in response to the arrival of blacks and Latinos, the Waddinghams served on committees aimed at persuading them to stay.

Although Waddingham seems convinced the book will be her last, her relatives want her to continue her autobiography where it left off, in 1926. It seems a tiring task, but for them she might take up her pen again. “I think they would appreciate it,” she said, winking.