Mary Trevor stands in her back yard that contains some award-winning floral fair entries. Photo by Doni Chamberlain
It was barely 24 hours before Mary Trevor’s deadline to drop off a carload of Shasta District Fair entries, yet she had the non-plussed, unhurried air of someone who’d done this a few times — or 40 — before.
The energetic, ebullient Redding 73-year-old is accustomed to calmly spinning multiple plates, a skill honed from decades of practice as a retired oncology nurse, a mother of two, grandmother of six, and as the wife/life partner for 51 years with her physician husband Everett Trevor, a pulmonary and sleep-medicine specialist with more than 50 years practicing medicine in Redding.
Trevor retired from her oncology career in September, but even at her own retirement party someone requested she please bring her famous carrot cake that contains an unexpected, secret ingredient. (See recipe, below.)
Some may be surprised to learn that for as much baking as Trevor does, she doesn’t consider herself a good cook, but rather, a baker. And even with regard to baking, she’s not inclined to make fancy layer cakes, as she’s more of a single-layer, 9-by-13-inch-pan kind of gal.
At her retirement party people said so many nice things about her that Trevor said she left with the bizarre feeling that she’d attended her own funeral. But speaking of funerals, somewhere there’s a video her son made — at her request — of her making a pie crust, something she did for a friend who needed extra audio/video instruction assistance to master the art of pie-crust making.
“I told my son he can play that video of me making a pie crust at my funeral some day,” Trevor said with a laugh.
Each summer Mary Trevor’s metaphorical plates give way to a kitchen covered with dozens of literal plates and platters filled with dozens of assorted items destined as entries at the Shasta District Fair where she inevitably rakes in copious award ribbons, including many blue ribbons. By the week’s end, the short list of Trevor’s blue-ribbon culinary winners would include awards for fruit pies, a pecan pie, machine-made bread and unfrosted bars. Ultimately, she entered 17 food items in the fair. She received a ribbon for every item, with the exception of a banana bread recipe, which she pronounced as “awful”.
She also submitted 27 floral entries, two of which succumbed to Redding’s heat and weren’t fit for the county fair. When asked which flowers she planned to enter, she laughed and said whatever was alive and looked good.
“Those were things I already had growing, and you never know until the last minute what you will have,” she said. “It was looking pretty grim a couple of weeks ago.”
She was especially pleased to get best of show for her African violet.
As she chatted, she multitasked. Periodically she abruptly stopped talking to double check multiple recipes. She set timers. Occasionally she opened the oven door to assess the cookies’ progress; too light, nearly done, or ready to remove.
Nearby, a large stainless steel bowl contained chocolate-chip cookie dough from which Trevor expertly manipulated two spoons — like culinary castanets clacking away — one to scoop the dough, the other to quickly scrape the dough onto the cookie sheet. Click, clack, drop the dough. Click, clack, drop the dough. Over and over again.
What? No Food Network ice-cream scooper?
She shook her head.
“Yeah, no. Ice cream scoopers make the cookies too big,” Trevor said as she used her double-spoon method to expertly click-clack-plop another mound of cookie dough onto the baking pan.
Nearby, three sheets of printed paper were within eyeshot of Trevor, who constantly consulted the typed words that were covered in check marks and scribbles to guide her through an array of 2026 fair submissions: Nut bread, machine bread, cinnamon rolls, sweet rolls, dinner rolls, sugar cookies, chocolate chip cookies, unfrosted bar cookies, roll cut and frosted cookies, cow cookies (in the children’s division). And so many pies! Two-crust apple pie, one-crust apple pie, pecan pie, one crust meringue pie, berry pie, cherry pie and a combination rhubarb pie.
She set the timer as she discussed her life, her recent retirement from a career as an oncology nurse, her family, her activities, and her annual tradition to bring multiple entries to the Shasta District Fair. Oh yes, she also talked about the family’s beloved pot-bellied pig, a family pet who lived a high-on-the-hog lifestyle with the Trevors until just a few weeks shy of the pig’s 18th birthday.
The road from Oregon to California
Mary “Wallen” Trevor grew up in Pendleton, Oregon, where she was first introduced to the world of county-fair participation as a young 4-H member.
She later met her husband while the two attended the University of Oregon Center for the Health Sciences in Portland, where she was a student, and he was an internal medicine resident.
“I had one of his patients, and I had to ask him a question about that patient,” she said. “I was terrified. That’s how it was in the old days.”
In 1975 they married in Athena, Oregon. He started a two-year pulmonary medicine fellowship at UCLA. The couple headed north following the fellowship’s completion.
“I was hoping for Oregon, but the best opportunity at the time was in Redding,” she said. “It has been a good life here. My kids received great educations and opportunities.”
Even so, she admits that her Oregon roots run deep.
“I am still an East Oregonian, deep down,” she said.
She marvels at the advancements in cancer treatments since she first worked in oncology. And although she’s often asked if it isn’t depressing to work in oncology, she said yes, it can be, but there’s an up side to oncology, too.
“The way I look at it is I’m helping someone, and even though sometimes people are sick, and sometimes they … a lot of times we’re providing ‘one more thing’ for people to experience,” she said. “One more wedding, one more grandchild, one more whatever, so I guess it just depends upon how you look at it.”
Through the years, she followed her passion for oncology patients, whether at Shasta Regional Medical Center, or Mercy Medical Center, or even with private physicians like Dr. Drake.
The Shasta County District Fair
The 2026 Shasta District Fair wrapped up the 2026 fair up last weekend. According to the SDF website, the facility is situated on 65 acres that features four large buildings, a huge livestock area and three large parking lots able to accommodate 5,000 vehicles. The Fair attracts more than 75,000 people during the four-day event each June, the largest single event in Shasta County. The Fair features livestock exhibits, arts and crafts, a carnival, entertainment, food and drinks. The Shasta District Fair’s legal name is 27th District Agricultural Association.
Sidenote: Shasta County has more 4-H youths than all of California’s other counties combined.
As an adult Trevor’s introduction to the concept of county fair entries began in the early to mid ’80s, when her children were little. She heard other young physicians’ wives talk about entering various jams and jellies in the local fair. Trevor took her children to the fair where she saw what she was up against.
“I thought, ‘Well, I could do that,’ ” she said.
Massive understatement.
At the time, she was a young mother who sewed much of her daughter’s clothing. So on a lark she she submitted some of her daughter’s outfits. To her delight, she won some blue ribbons. Next, she submitted a few baked items, and won blue ribbons for those, as was the case for some jams, too. After that, she was hooked, and each year after that she submitted a growing number of entries. She even carried on with baking for the fair the year her home’s AC unit stopped working, which left the kitchen hotter than the outside Redding heatwave. And there was one year when a family trip to New Orleans conflicted with the fair’s schedule. Undeterred, Trevor made her famous lemon meringue pie ahead of time and had a friend drop it off at the fair on her behalf. Yes, of course, she won a blue ribbon for that pie, even while vacationing in New Orleans. By the way, that same pie won a first-place blue ribbon this year, too.
Inquiring minds want to know: Is it wasteful to prepare so many entries that are eventually thrown away — inedible because the food has sat for four days in sweltering temperatures, subjected to flies and human fingers? Is it expensive to buy the ingredients and also pay the fair to submit entries?
In reply, Trevor said that she usually has on hand most of the ingredients she needs, with the exception of pecans for the pecan pie. She does stock up on extra flour, sugar and shortening (the latter of which is the most expensive item, which she uses for her award-winning pie crusts). There are strict rules regarding, for example, the number of cookies required on a plate (six), which means there are surplus baked goods that never make it to the fair.
“Except for the pies, I had a lot of cookies, breads, rolls, etc. left over that my husband takes to work, and I give to neighbors, so it all gets used,” she said.
Entry fees are $1 per item.
Each June turned into such an assembly-line production of fair-baking that Trevor’s mother started coming down from Pendleton each year to help as her daughter’s chief taster and “gofer” for trips to the former Raley’s for yet more ingredients. One year Trevor encouraged her mother to submit an entry, too, which is how Trevor’s mother became the joyful recipient of a blue ribbon for her chocolate pie that included her own mother’s pie crust recipe that featured the-then somewhat controversial lard ingredient.
Trevor’s mother was a D-Day veteran, and a World War II army nurse who later worked for a surgeon. When Trevor was a child she often accompanied her mother on medical house calls, a common practice then in rural Oregon. Trevor doesn’t doesn’t doubt that her mother’s example as a healer influenced Trevor’s decision to pursue a nursing career.
Trevor’s mother passed away several years ago, but fond memories about her mother are especially poignant during Trevor’s fair-baking days.
“She was an amazing person, but she was not really a cook,” Trevor said with a smile. “But she loved helping me each year, and this was like her thing.”
To this day, one particular incident involving her mother still makes Trevor and her husband laugh. She had just finished two batches of cinnamon rolls. The perfect cinnamon rolls, artfully displayed on a plate, were a fair entry. The other batch was the second-string cinnamon rolls; good enough for her family, but not a worthy fair submission. Trevor’s husband came into the kitchen and she told him he could help himself to the family cinnamon rolls. Buy mistake he grabbed a cinnamon roll from the plate intended for the fair. Trevor’s mother acted swiftly and with uncharacteristic alarm.
“You have to understand that my mother was my husband’s biggest champion. He could do no wrong as far as she was concerned,” Trevor said. “But when he took the wrong cinnamon roll, my mother said, ‘What are you doing?!!’ It scared him half to death. I somehow managed to fix things up with the cinnamon rolls, but he’s never forgotten it.”
For Trevor, as much satisfaction as she’s gained over nearly 40 years from owning literally boxes of blue ribbons, for her, the passion for submitting entries to the fair is more about keeping the spirit of the classic county fair alive than winning awards.
“I remember the fair as a kid, and over the years the competitions have become smaller and smaller,” she said. “I know a certain commercial part of the fair is expected, but an increase in the commercial side has also seen a decrease in some of the home-made things, and crafts, with fewer and fewer entries, which I find kind of sad.”
Trevor is doing her part to keep the county fair tradition alive in her own family, evidenced by a collection of cellophane-wrapped plates that held a sugar-cookie herd of colorful cow cookies, baked by some of her grandchildren, in their grandmother’s kitchen.
As Trevor finished up the chocolate chip cookies, naturally, the conversation turned to pigs. There was no way around it as there were pig artifacts and pig cups and pig mugs and pig-related decor scattered throughout Trevor’s spacious home.
Apparently, the Trevors once had a pot-bellied pig, thanks to their daughter, who was then a sixth-grader, who used her hard-won fiddling championship money to purchase the pig as a pet. During Miss Piggy Sue’s heyday, she tipped the scales at more than 300 pounds. The Trevors created a custom enclosure for the pig situated near the apricot trees. There was was a special garage door entrance so the pig could come and go into Trevor’s husband’s fly-tying room.
“Cary graduated from junior high school, she graduated from high school, she graduated from college, she graduated from graduate school, and all that time we still had her pig,” Trevor said.
“The pig was even present at Cary’s wedding rehearsal dinner. Not the wedding, though. Just the rehearsal dinner.”
Miss Piggy Sue grew so large that the veterinarian accommodated the Trevors with house calls. Miss Piggy Sue’s last car ride was as a 150-pound relative lightweight for a visit to Cary’s Shasta Meadow’s Elementary classroom during “P” week. Getting the pig to the school was no small feat. Trevor found a used dog-carrier for $25, and then loaded the pig into the carrier for the drive to school.
“I knocked on the door of this third-grade room, and I said, ‘I have the pig,’ can someone help me?’ The teacher looked at me kind of funny, like, ‘You need help getting a guinea pig out of the car?’ ”
She received some assistance from some other school employees, and again knocked on her daughter’s classroom door.
“The teacher answered the door and is like, ‘Oh my gosh! It’s a real pig!’ ”
Getting the pig back into the dog crate proved to be a bigger challenge, but Trevor eventually prevailed. That was the pig’s last outing. There was a false alarm when the pig suffered from a severe cough, which everyone assumed would be the end of Miss Piggy Sue, to the point where Trevor asked for someone known to have buried Wayne Newton’s horses to dig a hole out back in preparation of Miss Piggy Sue’s upcoming demise and eventual burial. A massive hole was dug that stood unused for quite a while.
Miss Piggy Sue recovered, and Trevor decided it would be in good taste to fill the hole prior to the wedding rehearsal dinner.
One day some time later Miss Piggy Sue pig died quietly at home while Trevor was at work.
These days, Trevor cares for smaller animals: one cat that belongs to her, three cats that belong to her son, and three cats that belong to a neighbor who moved into a retirement home.
Trevor’s a busy person by nature. Now that the fair is over she can resume her regularly scheduled life activities, such as babysitting in the church nursery one day a month. And she attends a few exercise classes at the Shasta Family YMCA. She spends time with her grandchildren; with the three Irvine grandchildren calling her “Anma” and the three Redding grandchildren calling her “Grandma Mary”. She’s a long-time alto with the Redding Community Choir. She periodically stays with an elderly woman to give the woman’s caretaker-daughter a break. She walks with friends. She works in her yard, and even does her own mowing on 100-degree afternoons, which she swears isn’t too hot, because it’s mainly in the shade. And she enjoys her swimming pool.
“I call it swimming, but it’s really more like floating,” Trevor said.
All the while, past, present and future fair entries are always in the back of her mind. In fact, she has one year to perfect that awful banana bread recipe. Anyone who knows Trevor will predict that come the 2027 Shasta District Fair, that banana bread will be a blue-ribbon winner.
Just like Mary Trevor.
Wait. Before you dive into Mary Trevor’s blue-ribbon recipe for Lemon Meringue Pie, or learn the secret ingredient in her famous Carrot Cake, if you are not already a supporter of A News Cafe, please join other dedicated subscribers who help support this locally owned, locally interested online media site. Thank you! I appreciate you!Â
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Mary Trevor’s Award Winning Lemon Meringue Pie
Crust
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon vegetable shortening
2 tablespoons ice water
Filling
4 egg yolks, room temperature
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup boiling water
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons butter
Meringue
4 egg whites, room temperature
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/3 cup granulated sugar
For crust: Mix flour and salt together. Cut in the shortening (using two table knives or pastry blender) until mixture is pea-sized, then add water. Form the dough into a ball and roll out on a floured surface. Place in a pie pan and flute the edges. Bake for 10 minutes at 400 degrees until slightly golden.
For filling: First mix the sugar, salt and cornstarch together in a medium saucepan. Add boiling water and stir over medium heat. Next mix the egg yolks and lemon juice together, stirring well. Add the egg yolk mixture to the water-sugar mixture and continue cooking over medium heat. Add the butter and stir. The mixture will begin to thicken. Remove the pan from the burner when the mixture is the consistency of pudding. Place the mixture in the baked pie crust.
For meringue: Beat the egg whites, cream of tartar and vanilla in a bowl until the mixture forms soft peaks. Slowly beat in the sugar until the egg whites are stiff. Place the meringue over the pie filling, taking care to completely seal pie crust edges with meringue.
Bake for 15 minutes at 350 degrees. Pie should be golden brown. Remove from oven and cool at room temperature before serving.
Lemon juice tip: When you have an abundance of lemons, bag and freeze them. When you need fresh lemon juice, pop one in the microwave for 60 seconds and you have fresh lemon juice. Â
Mary Trevor’s *’Secret Ingredient” Blue-Ribbon Pineapple Carrot Cake
This is a photo of Doni Chamberlain’s carrot cake, which looks similar to Mary Trevor’s.
Cake:
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups granulated sugar
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
4 eggs
*2 jars (6 ounces each) carrot baby food
1 8-ounce can drained, crushed pineapple
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
Frosting:
1 8-ounce package softened cream cheese
1/2 cup softened butter or margarine
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 3/4 cups confectioners sugar
Optional: additional chopped nuts
In a mixing bowl combine the dry ingredients. Add the oil, eggs and baby food, mixing on low speed until well blended. Stir in the pineapple and nuts. Pour into two greased and floured 9-inch round baking pans.
Bake at 350 degrees for 35 to 40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes before removing from pans and inverting upon wire racks to cool completely.
To make frosting: In mixing bowl, beat cream cheese and butter until smooth. Beat in vanilla and confectioners’ sugar until mixture reaches spreading consistency. Spread between layers and over top and sides of cake. Garnish with nuts, if desired. Store in the refrigerator. Makes approximately 12 servings.
