It’s Hard Way to Bake but the Bread Has a Mission

Ah, the aroma of freshly baked bread. There are few better pleasures of life.

So it is no wonder to see modern woman Dana Gutierrez Winn, 26, of Silverado re-creating yesteryear’s history by baking fluffy loaves of bread in an outdoor oven at the San Juan Capistrano Mission.

“Sometimes when the mission has not yet opened and the grounds are empty,” said Winn, who wears clothes of that era when she bakes the bread, “I look around and let myself go and fantasize that I’m in that time frame. It’s a good feeling.”

A ninth-generation Californian who also bakes at home, Winn believes it’s important to bring history to life. “We want to show the public the way life might have been in those early days when times were tough,” she said. “But they were also good times. Friendships lasted forever.”

But the bread, the bread.

“I remember when I first started the Living History baking program. A lady came out and asked, ‘Where is that smell coming from? It’s wonderful,’ ” said Winn, a mission docent who bakes the bread in a white adobe oven built late last year by Eagle Scouts. “That really encouraged me.”

Because of the oven size and the four hours it takes, just 12 loaves of bread are baked, and that’s only on the second and last Saturdays of the month. She then shares the bread with people visiting the mission.

“That shows how difficult it was just to cook during those times,” she said, while poking the burning wood in the dome-shaped oven, which is just one of a number of historical exhibits on view throughout the mission grounds.

While she attempts to keep her project authentic--the clothes she wears, the oven in which she bakes the bread, the recipe for the Spanish egg bread--Winn opts for such modern conveniences as an electric warming tray and aluminum foil.

A Cal State Fullerton graduate, married with one child, Winn believes the project is totally positive.

“When I’m standing outside and baking bread,” she said, “I’m answering questions and talking about the padres, soldiers and Indians, and how they existed and survived at the mission in those days.”

And she sometimes just stands there, waiting for the bread to rise in the oven and smelling the wonderful bread aroma, the way it was so many years ago.

It wasn’t really a surprise to Brian S. Massey, 18, when he walked into his Fullerton home and found the place decorated with colorful streamers. It was his mother’s way of saying congratulations for winning Grand Champion Market Steer at the Orange County Fair, not exactly a new experience for the Massey family.

In past years, Rosette Massey’s two other sons, Craig, 21, and Mike, 24, won the same prize.

But Brian had another benefit. His mom went to the fairgrounds earlier that day and decorated the stall for his 1,300-pound steer.

Preparing the steer for judging was a seven-month effort, said Brian, who saw his steer sell for $7 a pound at auction. He plans to use the money for schooling and a truck.

“You got to bust your butt to make sure everything is done for the steer,” said Brian, who made three daily trips during those seven months to Fullerton High where his steer was kept. “It just takes a lot of hard work.”

His mother agreed. After the judging, she and husband William Massey went away for a week to recover.

The object, said Lorraine Leavitt, 40, of Newport Beach, is to introduce economics in a fun and exciting way at an early age. And that’s why she has 15 elementary school children spending two weeks in a daily 9 to 11 a.m. economics class at UC Irvine.

“They’re all bright children, but when they leave here each day they go home and play baseball or soccer and look at television just like any other child,” said Leavitt, a Fountain Valley elementary teacher during the regular school year. She’s also the author of “Teaching Economics to Kids.”

She said each child sets up his or her business, learns how it operates, takes out a mock business license and develops an economics vocabulary. And they get homework every day.

She said it also teaches them that anyone can be a junior tycoon or young entrepreneur.

“One student opened a newspaper with his home computer in one of my earlier classes,” Leavitt said, “and before the class was over he was selling copies to the other students.”

Walter Statsky, 60, of Anaheim retired last year, so he hopped on his bicycle earlier this month and is pedaling the 3,100 miles to Washington. His wife Johanna, 62, who said she’s excited about the trip, is going along. But she’s following him in a van “filled with goodies.”