May 18, 2009 -Birthday parties are great; surprise birthday parties even greater. But a surprise 100th birthday party might be the best there is. Tuesday was Grace Matthews’ 100th birthday and HarborChase Assisted Living, where she is the oldest of all, threw her a surprise party.

The whole place showed up. Dozens of residents came in wheelchairs and walkers or walking alone if they could. The staff from all corners wedged inside the room. A pair of nephews came from Washington State to sing “Happy Birthday” to an incredible lady who tried to say she wasn’t incredible at all.

“I just try to live right, be nice to people,” said the one and only Grace Matthews. “Eat right. Exercise. Keep my mind sharp.”

Asked what the secret is to long life, Matthews cackled a bit. “Live in the now.”

And that is exactly what she did Tuesday.

Matthews stood up and blew out her candles that were the number “100” and made a wish. She did so even though she is blind. Wishes are supposed to be secret, but when you turn 100, you can do anything, and that is what Matthews, who lost her sight so many years ago, did.

“I wish for blessings for those around us,” Matthews told the room.

But the people around her say Matthews is a blessing. She has the bloodlines for it. Her great-great grandfather was Roger Sherman from Connecticut. The same Roger Sherman who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Matthews was from New Jersey, but her connection locally came when she married a Matthews named Benjamin.

“He was from Ebenezer, a place gone now that Rock Hill has absorbed, annexed,” Matthews said.

Ebenezer is the gone-now town where Herlong Avenue and Ebenezer Road intersect. The Matthews family had a cotton gin, store and more where the Food Lion is today. Ben Matthews died in 1950. Grace never remarried.

“I had the best man there was; I didn’t see a need for another,” she said.

After retiring, Matthews moved from Pennsylvania to York. In the mid 1980s, Matthews just plain gave away almost 300 acres near Sharon for education and conservation.

“That’s the kind of lady we are talking about, just the best,” said Norma White, a friend from First Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, where Matthews has been in the ladies circle for many years and still is. “Generous and wonderful.”

Inside that assisted living center, Matthews doesn’t talk of her deeds. She just makes the lives better of the people that she meets by giving each a little joy. She can’t see to write, so she dictates poetry to people who can see. One of those poems, inside a notebook in her room, has a line in it that states: “A compliment raises gloom and gives her spirit a lift.”

Grace Matthews wrote that poem at age 98.

What she does for others can be summed up in the way all those people cramed into that room for her birthday party, how they shoveled in birthday cake and lined up to hug her.

One of those is a peer from her ladies circle named Mary Phillips Gettys, widow of the late Congressman Tom Gettys. She has met presidents, senators, prime ministers and ambassadors from all over the world. She is not impressed easily. Yet, Gettys described Matthews on Tuesday with the words, “An amazing, vibrant woman.”

There must have been eight or ten people who said the same thing in one fashion or another. A lady stopped to say these words before she left: “Grace, I just love you for being you.”

By Andrew Dys
The Herald-Life, Serving York, Chester and Lancaster Counties