A Heart for Serving Others

Fall 2021 - Joan Matthews remembers the day she met her future husband, Ronald "Ronnie" Matthews, as clearly as if it were yesterday. The date was Sunday, October 21, 1956, and she was studying in the Baylor library. "A good-looking fellow student," as she describes him now, sat down at her table. After talking for a bit, he asked her out for a cup of coffee. She immediately said yes, but as he was walking away she realized she didn't know his name.

She figured nothing would come of the chance encounter - and then came a surprise.

"My suitemate said, 'I hear you and Ronnie are going out with Jimmy and me tonight,'" Joan recalled. "That became the first of many five-cent cups of coffee at the Elite Cafe that we shared."

Of her late husband, who died in 2018, Joan said, "Ronnie was the love of my life. He was an intelligent, Christian man who was so fun to be with. On March 22, 1957, he asked me to share life with him, and we were married on August 23, 1957."

Bloom Where You're Planted

Before transferring to Baylor, Joan received an associate's degree from Mars Hill University, in North Carolina. She studied education and history at Baylor, earning a B.A. in November 1957. By that time Ronnie - having earned a B.S. in physics and mathematics from Baylor in February 1957 - was working at the Philips Petroleum Company's rocket-fuel testing site in nearby McGregor, a facility that would soon become known as Rocketdyne and is now owned by SpaceX.

"Yes, he was indeed a rocket scientist," Joan said with a laugh.

Soon after they married, Ronnie was transferred to Philips Petroleum's computing department in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where he spent the remainder of his career and where Joan still resides. "It was the very beginning of the computing industry, and Ronnie worked on programs that were cutting edge, like the ability to pay at the pump," Joan said.

Joan had ambitions of becoming an attorney. "In my day, however, that pathway was not very open to someone who wanted to be a mother," she said. "Motherhood and Ronnie won out over being an attorney."

Eventually, in the late 1970s, Joan found a way to apply her skills and determination to a noble cause - serving others through a program providing hunger relief.

"I was a stay-at-home mom for our three children, Jim, Becky and David, and I enjoyed that period in my life," she said. "When the oldest went to college, I began working as the project director for a Title III program funded by the Older Americans Act. It was a nutrition project to assist Americans who were 60 years and older and needed food or the fellowship of eating together in order to have more well-rounded lives."

As part of her duties, one summer Joan and her colleagues conducted a door-to-door survey in Washington County, where Bartlesville is located, and adjacent Nowata County. They asked older residents, "Do you have enough to eat?" More than 30 percent said they did not.

Joan said that during the early days of her and Ronnie's marriage, when he was serving in the U.S. military and they were starting a family, she had personally experienced the challenges of hunger. "It was rewarding to be directing a program, with God's help, that addressed something as important as hunger in our community," Joan said. "A dietitian developed the menus, and we packaged meals and developed a delivery program that was able to reach people in many small towns."

An Eye on Growth

Today, Joan is continuing to make a difference in the lives of others while also honoring the memory of her husband by making a gift, through her estate plans, that will ultimately benefit the Ronald G. and Joan A. Matthews Scholarship Fund and the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty, which brings together a large network of researchers and practitioners working on a national scale to find innovative hunger and poverty solutions.

"My mother and father taught me to give back to your community and to people in need," Joan said. "Ronnie and I felt like Baylor was a wonderful place in which to put most of our future resources, to help open doors for future students who need financial help, as both of us did when we were at Baylor."

Joan said she and her husband made gifts to both Baylor and Mars Hill over the years. Eventually, they decided that creating a trust and naming Baylor as a beneficiary offered the best long-term vehicle for allowing Baylor to reap the benefits of the sound financial plan they had followed during their lives.

"We were one of the small donors who happened to have a very good investment firm and the money has increased," Joan said.

"I would like to tell people that if they only have a little to give, then just give it. The money will grow."