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Letter to the editor

Comfortable in all circles, at home with everybody

By MARTY CLEAR Times Correspondent
Published October 12, 2007

But she felt even more at home on camping trips to the American West, which she loved so much.

"She preferred turquoise, not diamonds, and she preferred jeans, not dresses," her son Sidney Matthew said. "She was very unpretentious, very down-to-earth. She was very sophisticated, but if she had her choice she'd wear jeans."

Mrs. Matthew died Oct. 3 of a heart attack. She was 80 years old.

"We had a family get-together in April for her birthday," Sidney Matthew said. "She said turning 50 was great, 60 wasn't bad at all and 70 wasn't worth a damn," Sidney Matthew said. "But at 80, she said, getting old ain't for sissies."

Mrs. Matthew was born to a prominent family in Webster, Iowa. Both her parents were physicians. Her identical twin sister, Virginia, had cerebral palsy but lived to age 64.

Her mother introduced her to William Matthew, the local newspaper publisher, and before long the two married.

Mrs. Matthew worked alongside her husband at various small-town newspapers he owned over the years. She could perform almost any job at a newspaper. It wasn't unusual for her to work until midnight helping to get the next day's paper out.

Meanwhile she was also a full-time mother of four sons.

"Her entire life was centered around her children," said her son Tim Matthew, who also went into the newspaper business. "Nothing else mattered to her more than the four of us, and that was true right up until the day she died."

Her husband became a newspaper broker, arranging sales of newspapers and newspaper chains. He liked Florida's climate and liked the Tampa Bay area in particular, so in the early 1960s he moved the family to Dunedin.

That required a lot of socializing, which was not among her husband's skills, Sidney Matthew said. So Mrs. Matthew gladly took charge of those duties.

"She liked people, and she was very, very savvy about reading people," Sidney Matthew said. "That was something my dad couldn't do, so she was tremendously important to his success. She could tell my dad 'You have to be soft with this guy.' He would not have been what he was without her.' "

But when she didn't have to entertain important people at elegant parties, she was likely to take her sons on weeklong camping and rafting trips down the Colorado River.

"She was very rugged, very athletic," Tim Matthew said.

Mrs. Matthew and her husband divorced around 1970, and she moved to Tampa. She took a job as a caseworker for the Hillsborough County Juvenile Detention Facility. She liked to tell people she was qualified for the job because she had raised four delinquent sons.

Mrs. Matthew worked with some very troubled kids, but always treated them with respect, and she earned their respect in return.

"They always trusted her," Tim Matthew said. "And these were kids who didn't trust anyone."

She worked at that job for nearly a decade, and quit in 1986.

"She retired about three or four months before she was eligible for retirement benefits," Tim Matthew said, adding that she didn't want to accept the extra money.

"She did the work because she loved the kids, not because of the money."

Besides her sons Tim and Sidney, Mrs. Matthew is survived by sons William and Jeffrey, a brother, nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

[Last modified October 11, 2007, 07:29:04]