Raul J. Arce

87, El Centro

“Where’s my doughnut?”

It was always one of the first questions Raul J. Arce would ask his daughter when she visited him. So she made certain before the threehour drive from her home in Tustin to his El Centro nursing home to stop at the doughnut shop to pick up a couple of glazed pastries.

“He loved his sweets,” recalled Adela Arroyo, Arce’s only child.

“He had diabetes, but even when I took him to the doctor, I’d make sure he had some Mexican lollipops to entertain him. The nurses would still ask him: ‘ Mr. Arce, do you want a lollipop?’ I’d be, like, ‘ I already gave him two!’ ”

Arroyo’s mother, Guadalupe — who was married to Arce for 58 years until her death in 2017 — would bake him pineapple cakes and take tamales or plantains to him at work.

Arce was born in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, and met his wife at a nightclub near the border in Mexicali. She was dancing with another man, but Arce managed to charm her nonetheless, and a month later they wed. They moved to Calexico after obtaining U. S. citizenship.

At first, Arce made ends meet by working in the fields harvesting lettuce, traveling throughout California to find the best crops.

Later, he became a school custodian, a job he held for two decades before retiring.

A devout Jehovah’s Witness, he spent most of his free time at church and enjoyed attending celebrations for those in the community.

“Whenever there was a wedding, he was always the first one dancing,” Arroyo said.

Arce was also passionate about table games, particularly dominoes. He and his daughter would spend most of their visits playing with the tiles, the games sometimes stretching on for hours. Sometimes, the “other grandpas and grandmas would join,” Arroyo said, because her father had a reputation for being one of the most social residents.

After two employees at his nursing home contracted COVID- 19 in March, the disease spread through the facility. Two weeks after contracting the illness, he died on July 9 at age 87.

“He had survived so much — collapsing twice from diabetes and having to be airlifted to a hospital,” Arroyo said.

“The last time I saw him was in February, because then they closed and said we could only see him at the window,” she said. “He was just a simple man who liked to play his board games. And who loved his sweets — always.”

Arce is survived by his daughter and two granddaughters, Ariana and Alyssa Arroyo.