Laura Mathews (far right), who has volunteered for the Long Beach Police Department (LBPD) for 35 years, hugs LBPD Police Chief Robert Luna during a celebration Tuesday in honor of Mathews’s 95th birthday.
However, Laura Mathews seems to defy that aging process. The 95-year-old military veteran has been volunteering with the Long Beach Police Department for 35 years— and shows no signs of wanting to quit anytime soon.
The LBPD marked the nonagenarian’s birthday— she turned 95 on Valentine’s Day— on Tuesday with a special event at the police headquarters downtown.
At the celebration, Karen Owens, LBPD administrator of community engagement, said she has had the pleasure of working with Mathews for 27 of her 35 years of service.
“I thought, when I came on and I met her, that she had already done everything— she had done it all,” Owens said. “And little did I know, 27 years later, that she’s still going strong and totally proved me wrong.”
In commending Mathews for her decades of volunteering for the department, LBPD Chief Robert Luna first mentioned that Robert Schroeder, also known as “Helmet Schroeder” because of his tendency to always don the protective headgear, has been with the LBPD for over 50 years.
“We look at him from a uniform perspective and go ‘Wow,'” Luna said. “So, we kind of consider him to be our iron horse. And then I start thinking about you (addressing Mathews), of course, all kinds of wonderful things come to mind— nothing but wonderful things. And I’m thinking, ‘Well, if he’s our iron horse, how do I classify you? […] What came to mind for me was, as opposed to an iron horse, an iron maiden.”
The chief explained that he hopes no one views that term in a negative way, adding that even two years of volunteer service would be impressive. He then praised Mathews for her fluency in five languages beyond English: Polish, Spanish, Italian, Russian and French. She serves as an on-call volunteer for translation services, according to the department.
“You are 95 years young,” Luna told Mathews. “That means you are part of what everybody considers to be the Greatest Generation. And when you think of the Greatest Generation, and you think of the values and the work ethic and the things that are so important to us today that your generation helped establish for us, to make us, really, the country that we are today.”
Luna then shared some of Mathews’s achievements and life experiences. She served in the United States Army Air Forces from 1942 to 1944, before marrying Gene Mathews, a World War II Army Air Corps veteran, on Sept. 23, 1944. Thirty years later, she earned an associate’s degree from Long Beach City College. She then served as a deputy director of Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services.
A Bridgeport, Connecticut native, Mathews served on the LBPD’s Senior Advisory Group from 1988 to 2008, and she has also been a member of the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program of Greater Long Beach since 1986, the LBPD’s K-9 Association Board of Directors since 1993 and the LBPD’s Senior Police Partner Program since 2003.
Luna said perhaps her active lifestyle is what has kept her “so young.”
“She was more focused on other people— not herself,” he said. “And I think that’s a lesson for all of us to take away from somebody as special as you, Laura— that you have invested so much time and effort into other people, and I think that’s why our good Lord keeps you around.”
After remarks from LBPD personnel, Mathews addressed those at the event by relating an incident that had occurred just 10 minutes before the gathering.
“A young lady came into the office to wish me a happy birthday, and she said to me, ‘Tell me your secret. Tell me your secret for longevity,'” Mathews said. “And I looked at her, and I said, ‘I really have no secret except one, and that is: God has always taken care of me because I haven’t got sense enough to take care of myself.”
Mathews added that she has always believed in teamwork and adhering to the motto, ‘Be good to yourself.’
“Because if you’re good to yourself, you’re going to be good to everybody else,” she said. “And, if you don’t know how to be good to yourself, you don’t know how to be kind or gracious or courteous to other people.”
