Judging by the depth of tributes at last evening’s memorial for Scott Wyant at the Vets Auditorium, he knew — closely — more persons than any man in America.

Some people collect friends.

What separated and distinguished Mr. Wyant was that he vigorously invested in them, and they, equally, in him. Friendship with Scott Wyant was a two-way street. Wyant Avenue was thick with unrelieved traffic at every hour of night and day.

Forty-seven years after starting college, admiring classmates not only remembered him but spoke of sharing virtually just-yesterday with him because they have spent so many of those 47 years of bulging moments by his side.

“He was the main man who drew us all together – he was the flame we gathered around,” said a poetic1970 classmate from U.C. Irvine.

Six-foot-two, blond, gregarious – he spoke to everybody, classmates remembered. The conversation never slowed, from the magical 1970s until May 11, when a 13-month battle with brain cancer prevailed.

Mr. Wyant was one of history’s rarest creations, numerous persons said, because he was as serious socially as he was literarily. Already taller than most of his friends, there was the flashback night he strode into Charlie’s Chili in Balboa Bay wearing a real, live orange traffic cone on his head —  within a flash, he was surrounded by a cluster of the prettiest, most intrigued — and intriguing — young women at Charlie’s.

In truth there were but two women in Mr. Wyant’s life, his wife Leslie Spanier Wyant, whom he married in 1984, and their daughter Molly, born in 1988, one year before the Wyants moved permanently to Culver City.

Mr. Wyant came to his widest public attention in the last decade.

Appointed to the Planning Commission in 2009, and re-selected four years later, he ran for the City Council last year. He finished just out of the money, and days later was diagnosed with brain cancer.

Master of ceremonies Leonard Koss called Mr. Wyant, his longtime neighbor, “a force of nature. He was kind, caring and empathetic.

“But the last thing Scott would want,” Mr. Koss said, “is a sad memorial.”

The tone had been set, irrevocably.

He was called more athletic than any team of players cumulatively. He participated in every known sport with more than one syllable.

The quintessential surfer, one person suggested Mr. Wyant may have spent as much of his adult life in the water as he did on dry land.

Characterizing him, some said, was like describing 20 people – he wrote for television, he tended bar in Marina del Rey, he made all adventurers who preceded him seem imagination-challenged, he achieved a bell-ringing slice of fame on a quiz show,  and most enduringly, the so-called computer geek operated Scott Wyant Information Systems.

A friend from kindergarten days in Stockton said Mr. Wyant was the smartest student in every class. Nearly all of the crowd of speakers saluted his extraordinary mind.

Fun and deep, abiding seriousness each formed one-half of Mr. Wyant’s remarkably fulfilled life, an intellectually wealthy life, speakers said.

His brother-in-law noted that Mr. Wyant, a voracious reader and literary maven, loved words and music with matching passion, not a common pairing.

Friends and relatives came early to the Vets Auditorium and stayed late. They had to.  There were so many sides to Mr. Wyant, known and loved by multiple types of crowds. The program doubled in scheduled length.

So many wanted to declare their own unique recollections of a man with more accessible sides than a Rubik’s Cube.

Rare indeed is the man who equally enthralls lovers of life’s literary side and is the exclusive owner of sui generis social centrifugal force.

After observing the two hurricane hours of tributes, a bystander who knew Mr. Wyant said that if the only invitees had been people who did not know and admire him, the crowd would have been much smaller.