Rick Earl Bodine of Redding, Calif., is becoming a national figure while virtually anonymous.

It was, for instance, Bodine that California Sen. Jim Nielsen had in mind a few weeks ago when he wrote his constituents about a burglar who "fell through a skylight while trying to break into a school."

Business Week magazine did not name young Bodine when it cited the case last month, in an extensive survey of the problems public agencies are having paying for insurance.

The case of Rick, who was 18 at the time, really is eye-popping: At about 1 a.m. on the dark and rainswept morning of March 1, 1982, while on the roof of Enterprise High School in Redding with larcenous intent, he fell through a skylight. Twenty-seven feet later he landed on his head on the floor of the girls' gymnasium.

His lawyers filed a personal-injury lawsuit that the Home Insurance Co. of New York settled for $260,000 up front, plus $1,500 a month for the rest of Rick's life.

That could be a life of leisure, but not of ease. Brain and brain-stem damage left young Bodine mute and quadriplegic. He has made modest progress toward recovery.

"We were not a party to the settlement negotiations. Our feelings ran just the opposite," said Gary Portner, business manager of the Shasta Union High School District.

Douglas Newlan of Redding, attorney for the insurance company, has been much criticized at Redding for the deal. He noted the other day that he had concurred in the settlement only after Joseph Redmon, the superior court judge who was hearing the case, ruled that criminal conduct did not bar Bodine from suing or from collecting.

Rick's family is not wildly enthusiastic about the settlement. Pat McAbier, his mother, said that their lawyer, Al Naphan of Oakland, Calif., had received most of the original $260,000. It probably would have cost the state more to pay for Rick's care through welfare than the insurance company will pay out, she speculates.

Behind the settlement and the controversy surrounding it are a complex of factors, including California law, the school district's safety record and the Bodine case itself.

Three of the Shasta district's schools were built with skylights that leaked and otherwise proved to be nuisances. Painters slapped paint on all three, so that the skylights blended in with the roof, especially after dark. There was evidence that the roofs were sometimes visited. Then, on June 6, 1981, Paul Andrew Schuur, 19, fell to his death through a skylight at Shasta High, also in Redding. He had been on his way over the roof to the school's closed swimming pool. That death brought neither suit nor settlement. Nine months later, when Rick went up on the roof at Enterprise High, the Shasta district was still planning its replacement of the skylights.

"Everybody has lost sight of the fact that the way the schools did those skylights, as far as I'm concerned, was criminal," said Rick's father, Jess, 53.

Bodine is from an athletic family. His two older brothers were college wrestlers, his only sister was a tennis pro. Rick, the youngest, was a wrestling standout, collecting several trophies, but a knee injury as a senior cost him a shot at a state championship.

A decent student in high school, Rick Bodine had never been in serious trouble. After trying the community college and deciding he was not ready for the world of scholarship, he went to work as a busboy at a Denny's restaurant for $3.50 an hour. He lived with two other Denny's workers, both 1981 graduates of Enterprise High.

The morning of the fall, the three roommates and another friend who was also a 1981 alumnus were at Enterprise High stealing the spotlights off the roof.

At first the four tried to take the spotlights mounted high over the high school tennis court. But a homemade rope ladder broke.

So Bodine went to the roof.

Bodine's companions eventually told police that he freed one of the lights and passed it down to them, was on his way to get a second when he crashed through the painted glass.

Two of the friends broke a window on a door, then unlatched it to get to Rick. They didn't have matches or a flashlight, nor could they find a light switch in the building where Bodine had fallen, so they stood around their friend in pitch darkness. Then Larry Crow went off to a nearby fire station to call an ambulance.

The case against Rick Bodine was dropped. Others in Redding with knowledge of the case agreed that he was being punished sufficiently.

The three friends have gone on in life. Parker manages a Denny's of his own.

"I try not to think about it," he said of the fall. "But working in a restaurant, every time you hear a dish break it sounds like the skylight in the roof, and you think back."

When he got married two years ago, Rick Bodine was his best man.

Rick's mother, Patricia, reclaimed her maiden name when she divorced Jess. When Rick came to live with her, three hospitals and 13 months after the accident, he was down from 169 to 112 pounds. At 6 feet 2 inches he was a living skeleton, his mother remembers.

She quit her job in a doughnut shop to nurse him, and that is still her full-time job.

For nine months she fed him. Then he regained partial use of a hand and arm, along with the ability to say a few words. Meals are still slow, with supper averaging an hour and a half.

When the settlement money came through, Rick and his mother made a down payment on a modest two-story clapboard house at Lake, Calif. A planned community, Lake has failed to achieve its potential splendor. But it does have one valued amenity: a guard at the gate.