Apparent oldest man in U.S. dies at 111
“My dad has seen it all — the advent of radio, World War I, World War II.” Steve Matthews, son
Clarence “Larry” Francis Matthews, who was born in Oakland just two weeks after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and was believed to be the oldest man in the United States, died Saturday at age 111.
Mr. Matthews, who died at his home in Indian Wells (Riverside County), was remembered by his son as a generous man who helped support his large family through the Great Depression and whose love of golf kept him going for decades longer than anyone expected.
“I started bracing myself when he was 90,” his 70-year-old son, Steve Matthews, told The Chronicle on Monday. “Most people I’ve ever known, if you lived to be 90, you were an old man. Well, that was silly — he just kept going for another 20 years.
“My dad has seen it all — the advent of radio, World War I, World War II. He lived through the Great Depression, when everyone went broke, the Korean War, the Vietnam War.”
Mr. Matthews was born in Oakland to two Portuguese immigrants who first came to the United States to work in the sugar industry in Hawaii before securing passage to the Bay Area. Mr. Matthews was the fourth of eight children.
When the family moved to Oakland, it was a city unrecognizable from today’s metropolis in many ways, with horses and wagons roving the streets, few cars or paved roads, and telephones still a relative rarity, Steve Matthews said.
“The only time you saw an airplane was at the county fair,” he remarked.
He said his father was gifted with numbers and worked in credit management, then carpentry and finally real estate, eventually becoming a shareholder in more than a dozen apartment buildings.
Mr. Matthews moved to Southern California in the 1970s and lived in Corona Del Mar and Newport Beach (both in Orange County), but the ocean air was hard on his wife’s arthritis, so the couple moved to Indian Wells for the drier climate, Steve Matthews said. It was when he moved to the desert that he took up golf.
“He loved golf,” said Matthews. “I think that’s one of the reasons he lived so long.”
“When he was 90 years old, we played golf at Indian Wells, and he shot 1 over par at 90. We had to buy drinks for everyone in the bar,” he recalled, chuckling. “He still looked like he was 60 or 65.”
Mr. Matthews was healthy and spry until a few years before his death, his son said, starting the day with a breakfast of Special K cereal and a banana, and walking miles in golf matches with friends.
Steve Matthews said his father died Saturday, several days after suffering a stroke. He is survived by two children, seven grandchildren, and many greatgrandchildren and greatgreat grandchildren.
“I said Dad, you just need to follow the light. The angels will take you and you can be up there, be with your brothers and sisters and mom and dad and your buddies,” said Steve Matthews. “Holding his hand and talking to him, whether he could hear me or not. I kind of think maybe it went in there and he understood.”
Mr. Matthews was verified as the oldest man in the United States in 2016 by the Gerontology Research Group’s Supercentenarian Research and Database Division.
His death makes Richard Arvine Overton of Bastrop, Texas, who is just 10 days younger than Mr. Matthews, the new oldest man in the United States.