WHITTIER >> Ice cream is not the first thing that comes to mind when looking to live a long life.

But for Carlos A. Bailey Jr., the sweet frozen concoction, especially strawberry, is key to longevity.

He should know.

Bailey Jr. turned 100 Monday.

His family celebrated the milestone Saturday at First United Methodist Church in Whittier and Bailey Jr. was asked by those in attendance how they could achieve the triple-digit birthday.

“I had given it a lot of thought,” he said.

“I eat a lot of ice cream,” Bailey concluded.

His father, Carlos Sr., lived to 104.

“My dad ate a lot of ice cream too,” Bailey Jr. said. “I visited him in Vermont, and we’d eat it together.”

On the elder Bailey’s 102nd birthday, a strange thing happened. No ice cream for the birthday boy.

“‘I don’t eat it anymore,’ he told me,” Bailey Jr. said. “Two and a half years later he died. I learned my lesson — more ice cream.”

Carlos Augustus Bailey Jr. was born Jan. 27, 1914 in Summerville, Massachusetts, but his family soon moved to Staten Island, New York.

“We moved around a lot,” he said, due to his father’s career in the Navy.

The family, which included two younger sisters and two younger brothers, moved back and forth across the country, settling at times in Washington, D.C., and San Pedro.

“It never bothered me because it was normal for me,” Bailey Jr. said of the somewhat nomadic life.

After graduating from San Pedro High School, he attended Long Beach Junior College, but the 1933 earthquake knocked it down.

“My folks were visiting family in Whittier, and they said, ‘we have a good college here,’” Bailey explained.

He studied pre-med at Whittier College, where he was a freshman when Richard Nixon was a senior.

“Nixon was a close family friend of my girlfriend’s family,” Bailey Jr. said.

He was married to that girl, Constance, for 46 years until her death in 1987.

They raised their twin sons in Whittier as Bailey Jr. opened up a family medical practice in the city, retiring in 1992.

“The best part was the people,” he said of his work.

Having stopped driving about four years ago — when he could no longer “move my feet fast enough to operate the stick shift” — Bailey Jr. likes to garden and spend time with his second wife, Audrey, 92, whom he married 20 years ago.

Along with his twin sons, he has three stepsons, four grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.