THE STORY OF A LIFETIME

By DAVID HALDANE

Nov. 15, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Violet Wightman marched into a freelance writing class at Fullerton College and told the professor how things would be. “I don’t have to do anything you say,” she said, “because I’m older than you.”

Wightman’s pronouncement turned out to be an understatement. Already in her 90s, she was decades older than anyone else in the class. She quickly became the dominant force and the center of attention--to the delight of her classmates. Today, at 97, Wightman is a campus icon and author of the only book ever published by Fullerton College.

“This woman is a national treasure,” student Robyn Bryson said of the elderly classmate who regularly regales younger friends with tales of a life spent hobnobbing with the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Amelia Earhart, Dorothy Chandler and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Julie Davey, head of the college’s journalism department, admits that she was skeptical upon first hearing those stories. “I was very patronizing because I didn’t believe her,” Davey said. But Wightman brought proof in the form of a yellowed newspaper photograph of herself with Earhart, the legendary aviator. Davey revised her opinion. “I knew,” she said this week, “that I had the real article.”

Wightman said she met all those famous people during a long career as a concert pianist. Born in 1901 in Globe, Ariz., she studied music as a child under composer Rachmaninoff, who she says called her his “little princess” and once adapted a polka so that she could reach the keys to play it with her small hands.

The Wightman family moved to Los Angeles, where young Violet once played to a crowd of 25,000 at the Hollywood Bowl. Later, while studying music in France, she made a concert tour of Europe’s major cities.

In 1931, the gifted pianist married a prominent dentist who had been her childhood sweetheart. The couple had four children together. Their union ended tragically 20 years later on a foggy road in France: An automobile accident left Wightman seriously injured and widowed at age 50.

“I was married to the best and never thought of getting remarried,” said Wightman, who moved to Fullerton in 1963 and lives in one apartment of a 90-unit complex owned by her family. “I’ve had a very busy life.”

Through it all she has meticulously recorded every event in scores of stories, poems and memoirs that now fill more than 150 cardboard boxes in her apartment, which is furnished with antiques. She enrolled in the college writing course in 1991, she said, to learn how to polish and organize the old works and to create something new. “I decided to write the history of my family,” she said, including a grandfather who was scalped by Geronimo.

The tales of her lifetime cover a wide range of topics and writing styles. Some are earthy and humorous, like the autobiographical piece about her stay in a French hospital where, Wightman writes, she inadvertently caused a pompous French physician to ruin an expensive pair of shoes by stepping into a bedpan full of urine. A novel in progress chronicles the travails of a eunuch named Francois who keeps trying to get into heaven while God keeps throwing him out. And Wightman’s proposed autobiography, professor Davey said, has the working title of “Moonlight, Palaces and Toenail Clippings.”

“She’s an excellent writer,” Davey said of her oldest student. “She’s a creative genius who can take the most mundane subject and weave it into a wonderful story. Everything she does has a little twist to it--it would be really tragic if her writings were never published.”

That grim possibility was what prompted college officials in June to publish a small volume of Wightman’s poetry. Titled “Sitting on a Cloud,” the book--on subjects ranging from fairies to motherhood--takes its title from the author’s often-repeated promise to fellow students never to die but instead to “sit on a cloud and be the wind against your cheeks.” The book was published, Davey said, because “I knew I was in the presence of a real genius and wanted to tell the world about her.”

Members of Wightman’s writing class already know what the world may someday discover.

“She’s taught me how to appreciate life,” said Robert Ibarra, 32, who works as a truck driver but is studying for a career change and spends much of his spare time writing. “She’s really inspired me to fulfill my dreams.”

Classmate Richard Santner said knowing Wightman has changed his life as well. “She said that she didn’t have enough time left to do what she wanted,” he said, “and I thought, ‘I’m only 40, I have all the time in the world.’ It really moved me. I couldn’t stop thinking of her.”

During a recent class session, Santner sat at the frail woman’s feet reading one of her stories aloud. Because Wightman is hard of hearing, class members often take turns sitting next to her as they present their work so that she can understand each speaker clearly. Many have visited her at home, helping to sort through the accumulation of her life’s work.

Much has changed in those many years, Wightman said. “I think there’s more love in the world today than there used to be,” she said. “I couldn’t be happier.”

That love was evident during a writing class on campus this week as Wightman, who fell recently, occasionally moaned in pain. Her classmates crowded around her, gently massaging her neck and speaking affectionately to her.

“This class would be dead without Mrs. Wightman,” student Ellen Simac said. “She does everything in spite of her pain--it’s made me realize that you never get old.”

And what of the writer’s assertion during her first class about who would be listening to whom?

“When she walks in,” Davey said, “she becomes the teacher and I become a student. I feel that if I interrupt her, I’m interrupting an important lesson.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Flame

How do you dance

O’er the embers red

And never scorch your wings?

Why do you sway

When the night wind bows

Whether it sighs or sings?

Are you the spirit of fire

Entomb’ed

Shut in this chimney old?

And will you mourn