Former First-String Athlete Now Plays Varsity as a Full-Time Homemaker

As she was growing up, Dianna Summers) was the first female student in Orange County to take auto shop in high school, she played basketball on a girls’ team that never lost and she was the quarterback on a girls’ tackle football team.

Now the 6-foot-tall Fullerton homemaker, who met her husband, Michael Mair, in a fencing class, spends all her time and energy on her home and family, including daughter Kendall, 2.

“I truly believe in the old values and principles that the family is the whole thing,” she said. “I didn’t want to send my child to a day-care center where they don’t get the parent’s values, thinking and morals.

“I think the family structure has to be kept. Children are the country’s lifeblood.”

Summers-Mair, 31, has jumped full time into homemaking, which she calls “a full-time activity. I don’t even have time for television.”

A Fullerton College graduate who majored in art and photography, she now plans to study home economics at a 4-year college.

Earlier this year, she won a series of first-place awards for her culinary entries at the Orange County Fair. She won a 1985 Libby Foods contest for her cake and in 1986 was a state finalist in a chocolate cookie contest.

Now through November, she is exhibiting some of her old-time kitchen utensils, including a jeweled strainer, and part of her 1,000-recipe book collection at the Fullerton College library.

Despite favoring old-time utensils, pots and pans and even furniture, she also uses such modern-day conveniences as a microwave oven.

And besides growing the herbs used in her cooking, she does the repairs on her 1965 Volkswagen, the result of 4 years of auto shop at Anaheim’s Kennedy High School where she was required to take a test before being accepted.

“Most of my friends who have two incomes drive new cars,” she said, “but that’s not important to me. Staying home with my child is important to me.”

Now she is learning how to spin on her new spinning wheel and some day wants to publish her own recipe book.

For Thanksgiving, the energetic homemaker will cook and serve her turkey and spinach lasagna, adding fennel to give it a sausage flavor. She also plans to re-create her great-grandmother’s sweet potato pie.

As an only child with close ties to her mother and father, Mary and Ray Summers of Buena Park, Summers-Mair has an easy explanation for keeping her maiden name: “When I got married, I didn’t divorce my father.”

Eleven years ago, Paul C. Saucedo Jr., 57, of Anaheim took stock of himself and decided he didn’t like what he saw.

He was 5 feet, 4 inches tall, weighed 170 pounds and smoked cigarettes. And he felt rotten.

So he started running and last month won the 10K run in the 55 to 59 age group of the World Senior Games in St. George, Utah. He defeated 12 others.

He’s completed the Los Angles Marathon three times--”I do that as a challenge to let myself know I can run 26 miles”--and has chalked up 20 different 10K road races.

The Los Angeles Times platemaker said he now weighs 130 pounds, quit smoking and feels “like I’m 20 years old. Well, maybe 25.”

There was some talk at the annual Anaheim Fire Fox calendar competition, which drew a crowd of 800 women and raised $32,000 for the Burn Center at the UCI Medical Center, that some of the contestants “looked so young and babyish.”

“I think they wanted some old blood in there too,” answered fireman Ray Galaz, 44, who was pictured on the 1985 calendar (at age 41) and is the oldest Fire Fox selected.

This year, he saw his firefighter son, Dave Galaz, 25, selected for a place on the calendar.

“I think it’s terrific,” said the senior Galaz. “I hope he stays in as good a shape as I do.”