A Record Set in Concrete Brings Driving Award

For 20 years, Don Tiziani has been trucking the roads and freeways in Orange County with a 40,000-pound payload, delivering ready-mixed concrete.

It’s not a glamorous job, but the Tiziani, 55, just got a lift in life from it.

He won the National Safety Council’s outstanding performance award for driving 25,000 hours without a preventable accident and became a member of its prestigious Million Mile Club.

The Westminster truck driver said the award “is the most outstanding thing ever given to me. . . . All my relatives have excelled in something, and now I have too. It’s a great feeling. It’s like getting the gold in the Olympics.”

The comparison with relatives may be too harsh because Tiziani made a mark in other areas in his earlier days as a sky diver, a ski jumper, a qualified scuba diver and a small-plane pilot.

But this award means a great deal to him. “I can die knowing I did something very few people have done or are capable of doing,” he said. “Call it luck or call it the power of prayer, it was really a difficult thing to do.”

Tiziani said he prays a lot when driving his three-axle concrete truck.

“I believe in the laws of averages,” he said. “There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t see a bad accident. I figure somewhere along the line, I’m going to buy it.”

In the meantime, Tiziani said he tries to protect himself from “people in cars that cut me off and other truck drivers who shouldn’t even be driving.”

Tiziani said that people drive too fast on congested area freeways and that “there are too many new drivers who don’t know how to drive trucks.”

He believes that the Department of Motor Vehicle examiners should do more extensive checking of drivers before granting licenses.

“They should create problems and see how the truck driver reacts,” he said, “just like (testing for) people trying to get a pilot’s license.”

Tiziani began as a truck dispatcher but said he could not stand the stress of that job.

“I started at the top and worked myself down,” he said. “I couldn’t handle the pressure as a dispatcher, so my doctor told me to get a job as a truck driver and gather myself together.”

That included attending Alcoholics Anonymous to stop drinking, he said.

“I used to like driving, but not so much now,” said Tiziani, who said he has an industrial arts degree from a community college in Michigan.

“I’ve seen more dead people in accidents in the last 3 years than all the other years I’ve been driving. It’s getting worse by the month. I’m beginning to weaken, and I keep thinking about the law of averages.”

Nine years ago, Steven Ruhnau asked Margaret Chabot to marry him, but she did not say yes until recently. So they got married Tuesday night on Valentine’s Day at the Improv Comedy Nite Club in Irvine.

The Trabuco Canyon couple, according to best friends Mona and Steve Corris of Irvine, thought it would be a fitting location for the nuptials.

“They told us, ‘marriage is no joke, but let’s have some fun,’ ” Mona Corris said.

For 18 seasons since 1971, Patricia and Martin Healy of Tustin had attended an unbroken string of football games at Foothill High School.

In recognition of their devotion, the Tustin Unified School District Board of Education has awarded the couple a certificate of merit for their support of the school’s football program.

And no wonder. In each of those games, the Healys were watching one of their seven sons play freshman, junior varsity or varsity football.

At one point in 1980, the Healys had five sons playing for different teams, so Mother went to the home games and Father went on the road.

Their sons, now 17 to 30 years old, are Marty, Mike, Chris, Matt, John, Brian and Dan, the youngest, who brought the Healy tradition to an end when he graduated last year.

“My sons were not particularly big,” said the father, who was a defensive lineman in his high school days, “but they sure had guts. They had more heart than size.”

The Healys never had a daughter.

“I was a specialist,” said Martin Healy, a financial adviser.

“I only created football players.”