Countywide : Last Lotto Splurge Is a Lucky One

A month and a half after she was laid off, Dianna Zurbuchen’s job search was still fruitless, and she and her husband, Mitch, decided that they would have to cut corners--fewer weekend day trips, fewer surprise gifts for their grandson and not as many lottery tickets.

Luckily, the couple agreed last Saturday to splurge on that last luxury just one more time.

One of the three Super Lotto tickets they bought at Wayne’s Liquor store in Villa Park hit for $1.1 million that night. Zurbuchen now says her frantic campaign mailing resumes suddenly seems a little less pressing.

“Oh, this really came just when we needed it,” she said Thursday. “We weren’t destitute or anything, but we were really starting to feel it. We had lost half our income, and things were getting tighter.”

The Zurbuchens, residents of Orange, shared the $3.3-million pot with two other winners, including one who bought a ticket in Stanton and has yet to claim the winnings. Zurbuchen, 49, said she was unaware of the jackpot until late Monday afternoon when she returned home from her first-ever exercise class and looked at a newspaper clipping to check her numbers--8, 12, 20, 38, 42 and 50, selected from a monthly astrological newsletter.

A minute later, still red-faced and decked out in exercise clothes, she was driving to her husband’s workplace, a drinking-water company in Santa Ana, to tell him the news. But Mitch Zurbuchen, 52, was out on a job, so she had to wait until that night.

“We were so excited,” she said. “It still doesn’t feel real, it feels like a dream. That probably won’t change until we get the first check in our hand, when we see it and feel it.”

The prize will be doled out in $55,000 annual payments over 20 years.

Zurbuchen said the excitement of winning seemed even greater after losing her job in early May as an on-site trainer for a small Anaheim telecommunications company. The company let her go because of budget cutbacks and the poor economy, she said.

“They just handed me my check, and that was it. I had never been laid off before,” she said. “You just go down to the very pits of the Earth. Your self-worth goes down to diddly.

“But things are looking up now,” she said. “I still can’t believe it, though.”