Author: Yennaedo Balloo
A boy becomes a man when he devotes himself to a career and a family. If a man can devote himself to a principle or an ideal thoroughly enough, then he becomes legend. If this is the case, then our now departed chef, and current EMT, Matthew Perez is more than just an incredible hand at our lunchtime pasta.
A regular cook at the pasta bar during lunchtime, Perez is a chef, to be sure, but he is also a lot more than that. His first job was working as a chef for Chuck E. Cheese in high school for two years. This job was taken on in lieu of playing football (Perez played as cornerback his freshman year and then linebacker his sophomore and senior years). Ever the forward thinker, Perez decided to save up for a car rather than devote all his time to football. “Being mobile was going to be a lot more important than losing brain cells,” he said.
Perez’s path to Oxy is an interesting one, and showcases his other passion in life, which ultimately is tied even to his passion for cooking here at Oxy: serving and taking care of other people. After high school, Perez began working as an LA park ranger, first for the Valley, then Griffith Park, and eventually the entire South Side all the way down to San Pedro. Perez said that after year working with the Rangers he discovered that a wider breadth of knowledge would be useful. “About a year into that I decided I needed more knowledge than I had in terms of bodies and how to help somebody, so I got certified as an EMT,” he said.
Perez worked a total of six years as a Park ranger. Five of them were spent on a fire engine, which he says is the source of some of his fondest memories. Perez spoke of a time when rangers were allowed to ride on the tailboard of the engine with nothing but a rope harness to “keep you from flying off.”
“I can recall just standing there, leaning back in the harness and watching little kids do what little kids do: run along the truck and wave to the firemen,” he said.
Perez made the jump from Ranger to chef fairly smoothly. Perez explained that after his six years as a part-time Ranger, looking for a full-time job in the city had become a difficult, if not less attractive, notion.
“The only reason why I left was because at the time the city was in a hiring freeze, and the only people being hired were for the fire department and police department, and my father spent nearly thirty years as a police officer in LA and after seeing the overall attitude towards the police department change over the years, I decided to go a different route,” he said.
The alternate route led Perez to Mission College culinary school, which he attended under the advice of the then head and sous chefs at Oxy. Part of the way through the two and half year program, Perez applied for a part time job here and became a Cook B-just below the A position.
“Starting from the top, you have your head chef or executive chef, then you have the sous chef who’s your number two, then there are three of us Cook A’s, myself, Joseph Parks and Warren Harrington,” he said. “From there you have the books B’s, there are 12-month cook B’s, nine-month cook B’s and then you have what are called casuals who aren’t necessarily union members, but they’re still a part of the staff.”
Just after he graduated from culinary school, a position as a Cook A opened up. Perez seized the opportunity. “It was kind of serendipitous timing that I managed to finish up my program and get here all in one fell swoop,” he said.
Since coming to Oxy full time, Perez has belonged to the union and serves as a steward, or a liaison between management and staff. “You have chances of misunderstandings and the goal is just to get a positive outcome for the college and the students,” he said.
Perez has been a full-time chef here for eight years now, and was part-time for two years prior to that. For the past year, however, Perez has been working with an ambulance dispatch company training young EMTs in skills they can use in the field. Perez has left his post at Oxy to take on a full-time position as a supervisor with the company.
“They want to bring me on full-time as one of their supervisors, which I’ve always stated was one of my loves: to take younger and inexperienced people and to impart some knowledge to them,” he said.
This dream job comes with a considerably ambitious project for Perez very much in the vein of imparting knowledge to younger ones.
“I’m also going to be implementing a training program, something we call continuing education units, basically so that every two years you have to have at least 24 hours of continuing education to recertify, and part of that recertification is also taking a skills exam where they review the skills you should have as a paid EMT,” he said.
It’s important work, and Perez looks forward to contributing toward giving younger EMTs clearer heads and skills they could use to save lives.
“It’s really becoming a passion of mine, I really enjoy the contact with these younger EMTs who might find themselves a little bit nervous because they don’t know what to do, and hopefully from some of my own experiences I can send them in the right direction,” he said. “You give someone a clearer head and they can walk into the situation at least with some ideas of which route they should go.”
It’s Perez’s devotion to gaining knowledge that makes him a useful asset, but it is his love for sharing knowledge and his overall compassion that makes his absence all the more noticeable.
Perez was the faculty staff coordinator for the Outdoor Adventure Club, Oxy’s outdoor hiking group. Having spent a lot of his vacation time hiking, backpacking and camping with his friends from high school, Perez’s experience made him a great leader for the group, and demonstrates his love of not just the pastime, but the campus as well.
Perez explains that he loves the community at Oxy from his experience of seeing what our institution can actually do to benefit the students attending. “It’s a really cool thing to see a scared, wide-eyed freshman come in here thinking ‘oh my gosh, what have I gotten myself into?’ and then see them four years later walk in standing tall, confident and adjusted, ready to take on the world,” he said. “That is such a kick in the butt for me to see that growth, and I have yet to be disappointed. Everyone walks out of this place having grown in some way or fashion.”
This kind of outlook makes Perez’s trademark personality much easier to understand.
Anyone who has encountered Perez in the Marketplace can identify him, if not by name, but his universally genial attitude toward everyone he meets. Perez is rife with running jokes and funny stories (a personal favorite of his being asking patrons of the pasta line: “What can I burn for you today?”).
Perez’s sunny outlook could be decried by some as resulting from being overly optimistic, but the fact is that Perez served at Occidental for 10 years, and he has embodied this attitude for all 10 years-the result of advice received from a mentor as a field officer for the rangers.
“It comes from years when I had just started working in the medical services. It’s really easy to get jaded doing anything or to just blow off somebody because they’re ‘just another freshman’ for example or ‘another person I’m taking to the hospital,'” he said. “The way I motivate myself is I look at the person and I say: ‘this person is special to somebody,’ and I take that to heart-I started looking at people differently because everybody is going to be special to somebody.”
“You really have to firmly try to treat everybody the best you can, but if you keep that in your head it makes a good starting point, and it makes conversations with anyone quite easy . . . you just have to be willing to say ‘how are you doing?’ and care enough to hear the answer,” he said.
This kind of compassion is evident in both of Perez’s career fields. As an EMT supervisor he will be working to save lives, but as a chef at Oxy, Perez’s
rapport with most of his student patrons (rather, friends) is a testament to his creed. Perez’s general policy with cooking here has been, “Would I eat that?”
“You students are putting something in your body and that’s a lot of trust right there . . . so I always ask myself that question. There’s been a few times where I’ve maybe sautéed an item too much and I’ve said to the student ‘I can’t serve you that, let me redo it,’ and I only do that because I ask myself the question every time,” he said.
Perez’s compassion in serving and caring for other people is evident in his life experiences. His personable and caring attitude is his defining characteristic that will be remembered in the wake of his departure. His outlook on the school and life in general is one that has made countless students enjoy his company more than his cooking, and even though his last day was Mar. 13, his perspective on the campus is a spirit which we will surely miss and hope to carry on.
He left with this praise for our campus and encouragement to anyone who is looking for that reason to try just a little harder. “We talk about diversity here, we talk about acceptance, it’s easy: you just have to let it happen,” he said. “It’s there, and it’s fun to watch and be a part of.”
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