Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS. : MISCELLANY/ NEWSMAKERS AND MILESTONES

“We’re not really big gamblers at all,” said Joanne Pavia of Newport Beach.

Well, there was that $250,000 slot-machine jackpot she won at the Las Vegas Hilton last August. That got her and husband Ken invited to Reno last week where she competed in a slot-machine tournament at the Reno Hilton. She won $1 million.

That brought her winnings to a total of $1,251,384. “I’ve had a pretty good year,” she conceded.

She’s certain that her “lucky crystal,” a hunk of quartz placed atop the slot machine, was drawing “positive energy” from the crowd. She could feel it, she said. She was pretty sure that the slot-machine brooch and the rabbit’s foot helped, too.

On the other hand, she said, she could never understand “why anybody would throw good money away.”

Casino officials could only say that Pavia’s performance was impressive. “She’s a perfect contestant,” Hilton spokesman Bill Barron said. “She talks to the machine and everything.” What does she say to the machine?

“That’s a very personal question,” Pavia said.

If the delegates at the fourth annual Conference on Women in Anaheim needed a role model for perseverance, they had one before them: 45-year-old Wilma Rudolph.

As one of 22 children in a Tennessee family, she contracted polio at an early age, ignored the prognosis of her doctor, while still in her leg braces decided to become a sprinter and at age 15 won a bronze medal in the 1956 Olympics. Four years later, she won three Olympic gold medals.

As she faced the 4,000 women in the conference audience last week, she told them bluntly: “Anything that anybody in this room wants to accomplish, you can do. But you have to believe it.”

The audience gave Rudolph a standing ovation and cornered her for an hour to sign autographs. “It’s a good feeling to know that your accomplishments mean something to people,” she said.

Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth H. Dole, the highest-ranking woman in the Reagan Administration, addressed the same conference. She told the women in the audience that “we have not reached the millennium yet. We still have a long way to go.”

But at her press conference, reporters were more interested in airline security in the wake of the American attack on Libya.

Stepped-up security at airports already has helped prevent terrorism in the United States, Dole responded.

The Orange County Board of Supervisors, acknowledging his work in developing Dana Point Harbor and the county’s master plan for parks, passed a resolution honoring Ken Sampson, the former director of the county’s Harbors, Beaches and Parks Department, on his 80th birthday.

After the ceremony, Sampson, who retired 11 years ago, drove to Dana Point, walked onto the bluff-top park named the Ken Sampson Overview and surveyed the 15-year-old harbor. “I have to admit I feel a little proud,” he said.