1 THE LONELIEST ROAD IN AMERICA
US Highway 50 is a three-thousand-mile route running from the East Coast to the West. It begins in Ocean City, Maryland, and ends in West Sacramento, California. The western part of the highway snakes through swaths of desolate countryside, including a section in Nevada dubbed “the Loneliest Road in America.” Built in 1926, this asphalt road overlays what originally was the Central Overland Route and the Pony Express trail.
This treacherous path crosses several of the state’s mountain ranges at high altitudes, winding through four old mining towns. One of these settlements, Ely, lies on the eastern edge of Highway 50 about 320 miles east of Reno. In 1912, when future First Lady Thelma Catherine “Pat” Ryan was born in this remote area, not even the Loneliest Road in America existed. Located in White Pine County, Ely was a hardscrabble frontier town surrounded by snowy, rugged mountains, scraggly pine trees, and a rocky, forbidding landscape.
The area’s first residents were Shoshone Indians. By 1860, a Pony Express post office and telegraph and the Central Overland Route stagecoach stop were among the few signs of formal settlement a traveler could find there. Mining boomtowns for gold, silver, and lead blossomed and then withered in the region like desert flowers. Vermonter J. W. Long arrived in White Pine County in 1878, founding the township of Ely after he discovered gold in the area. In 1887, the state legislature made Ely the county seat, spurring further development. A Wells Fargo office, a newspaper publisher, drinking establishments, businesses, and homes began to dot the sparse landscape.
In 1906, the town’s fortunes improved dramatically. Copper was discovered in the area, and the Nevada Northern Railway arrived the same year to transport the precious metal to market. “The Nevada Northern Railway single-handedly made the development of the copper industry possible in White Pine County. Without the railroad, there would be no way to move the ore from the mines to the mill.” Copper was crucial for the latest technology: the metal was utilized in telephone wire and for electrical wiring.
Miners soon came in droves to Ely to seek their fortunes, including William “Will” Ryan. Will was an easterner by birth, born January 7, 1866, in Ridgefield, Connecticut. He was a good-looking man, tall, rangy, and blue-eyed, whose parents hailed from County Mayo in Ireland. The young man had a serious case of wanderlust, and “early in life … developed an itch for travel and adventure.” Will worked as a deckhand on a whaling ship, a surveyor in the Philippines, and a gold prospector in the Yukon.
Though he found no gold in Alaska, he continued his mining career, searching for his fortune in South Dakota’s silver mines. It was here he met Kate Halberstadt Bender, a German immigrant from Hesse. When Will met her, Kate was a widow with two young children. Kate’s previous husband, Matthew Bender, had been a mining shop foreman who died in a flash flood while Kate was pregnant with their second child, daughter Neva. The couple also had an older son named Matthew.
* * *
Will was forty-three when he married the twenty-nine-year-old Kate in 1909. The couple had heard enticing tales of rich gold, silver, and copper deposits in Ely, Nevada, and soon moved there to try their luck yet again in the mines. Many before them, including writer Mark Twain, had been drawn to Nevada for the same reason. Twain’s classic 1872 book Roughing It is a satirical chronicle of the get-rich-quick dreams of those like Will. However, these dreams of massive wealth were almost always chased away by the daily realities of mining. The profession was defined by its dangerous and backbreaking work. Those who chose this career were not only betting against the odds that the mine would yield riches but also gambling with their lives. “The miserable living conditions, the poor sanitation and terrible food, the inadequacy of medical care and the high-risk work of mining created an alarmingly high mortality rate.”
Despite their firsthand knowledge of the dangers of the mining profession, the newly married Ryans arrived in Ely and lived first in a tent city. By 1910, the Ryans’ eldest, William (known as Bill), was born, followed by son Thomas (called Tom) in 1911. At some point during the Ryans’ time in Ely, young Matthew Bender was sent to live with his well-off grandparents in Los Angeles. While this must have been heartbreaking for Kate, she had her hands full caring for Neva, Bill, and Tom in a tiny unheated cabin. She may have welcomed the opportunity for a better life for her oldest child.
By 1912, the family was living in a rented two-room miner’s shack on the south side of Campton Street between Fifth and Sixth Streets. Ely remains one of the coldest cities in the United States, with temperatures in March sometimes falling below zero. The early morning of March 16, 1912, was frigid. On this day, Thelma Catherine Ryan arrived at 3:25 a.m. When Will arrived home, delighted with his little girl, he affectionately called her his “St. Patrick’s Day Babe in the Morn,” and ever after insisted on celebrating her birthday on St. Patrick’s Day. He also added Patricia to her given names, but she was always “Babe” to him. She herself would not go by Pat until her college days, preferring to use Thelma or her childhood nickname, Buddy, as a young girl.
The weekend of Pat’s birth, a local movie theater, the Bijou, was showing The Broken Spur, while a rival theater, the Empire, was showing A Frontier Girl’s Courage. The local dry-goods store was selling children’s clothes for 48 cents and ladies’ house dresses for 98 cents. Nationally, the biggest news story of the spring of 1912 would be the loss of the newly built, state-of-the-art luxury ocean liner Titanic, which sank after hitting an iceberg on April 15. Fifteen hundred passengers and crew lost their lives that night.
A few days prior to Pat’s arrival, on March 12, Juliette Gordon Low established the Girl Guides in Savannah, Georgia. This organization would later acquire its current name, the Girl Scouts. The organizational principles of the Girl Scouts “focused on the outdoors, inclusiveness, volunteerism, and self-reliance.” Both the young Thelma Ryan and the older Pat Nixon would connect deeply with the Girl Scout mission: the core principles of independence and self-reliance meshed well with the tough lessons Pat learned in her childhood from her hardworking parents and their harsh life on the still untamed western frontier.
* * *
In the early 1900s, life in the West was a wild card that could play out in different ways. Here a person could gain or lose a fortune in a matter of months or even weeks. An individual (even a woman) could stake a claim to a homestead and make a go of it. Newcomers could elevate themselves socially with few restrictions if fortune smiled upon their endeavors. Men and women often worked equally hard under harsh conditions. Intense labor from both halves of a couple was required to make their joint risk pay off.
Partially due to the more equal partnership demanded within the frontier culture, western women had more rights during the settlement era than their sisters back east. Women achieved enfranchisement in the western states of Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon in 1912, the same year Pat was born. Her home state of Nevada was not far behind, recognizing women’s right to vote in 1914, six years prior to the passing of the national suffrage amendment in 1920. As Anne Martin, president of the Nevada Equal Franchise Society, described it in an article in Suffragist magazine in November 1914, “The most important educative factor in our campaign was personal contact with the voter.” This kind of door-to-door campaigning is a skill Nevada-born Pat would become proficient at later in her life.
The mining community Pat was born into was especially supportive of giving its women the vote. “Nevada owed much to the progressive-minded, often transient miners of the eastern region.” Mining couples like Will and Kate Ryan well understood what Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin meant when she said, “Men and women are like right and left hands. It doesn’t make sense not to use both.”
However, Will, Kate, and their brood didn’t remain in Ely for long. “Kate, who hated and feared mining, pleaded with her husband to give up the perilous business.” Though Will was reluctant to leave a profession he knew so well, the couple jointly decided to seek the greener pastures and much improved weather of southern California.
* * *
Will, Kate, and the children traveled by train to Los Angeles and then arrived in the tiny town of Artesia (now Cerritos) by buckboard wagon. Although the town was less than twenty miles southwest of urban Los Angeles, it was mostly farmland when the Ryans arrived in 1913. The business section of town consisted of both sides of a single street. The unspoiled landscape showcased two very different microclimates, as “ten months out of the year you could see snow on the mountains and on either side of the highway were beautiful orange groves” that perfumed the air in spring.
Will and Kate soon bought a “ranch,” a small one-story home on a flat ten-and-a-half-acre lot on Pioneer Boulevard. The small home had no running water or electricity. The house initially had only five rooms and no indoor bathroom. Eventually the family added a wing, tore down walls, and extended the living room to include a separate bedroom for Pat. The pride of the house was a baby grand piano—though none of the Ryans played.
Will knew nothing about farming prior to buying the land in Artesia. However, he committed himself to his new vocation and read voraciously about agriculture, soil, and farming techniques. “All of this study paid off, and he eventually became known as the ‘cabbage king,’ because he raised the biggest cabbages in the county.” Kate, Pat, and Pat’s brothers all worked together to help Will make the farm a success. But Will didn’t give up completely on mining and the siren call of riches. “He invested in oil wells or mines whenever he could spare the cash.”
Pat loved stories, reading, and books from an early age, a trait she shared with her father. Louise Raine Borden, Pat’s childhood friend, claimed that Pat also inherited her father’s deadpan sense of humor. She recalled: “He [Will] was quiet, and he was quite a humorist. He’d tell funny jokes and never crack a smile … he always had a yarn to tell, funny story of some kind.” Pat “has quite a sense of humor and always did. Now, she probably did get it from her dad.”
While Will was widely read and well traveled, Kate connected more to home and hearth. She was “heavy set” and spoke in broken English, but she was sweet to children and “always made real good cinnamon rolls.” Pat was especially close to her mother, who taught her how to keep house, sew, and cook. Another family friend, Morton Morehouse, remembered that Kate was very much a woman of her time and place. She “was like many women in those days; she was pretty much of a housewife, and she didn’t go out much.”
Louise’s sister, Myrtle Raine Borden, was also a close childhood friend of Pat’s. A favorite pastime that already showed Pat’s growing interest in the theater was putting on plays on top of an old water tank on the Raine property. Pat reigned as the director and organizer of the productions. Louise recalled: “She’d make them up and we’d dig out old clothes and sheets. There was nobody at home to tell us we couldn’t have them.… We’d put on those little old plays out there on top of the tank house” for the neighborhood kids. Myrtle characterized Pat as having “a mind of her own” and a bit of a hot temper as a child, “but she never showed too much of it.” She may have had an innate tendency to let her resentments simmer, as her childhood friend noted: “I don’t know if she carried a grudge or not, but she wouldn’t get right over it.”
* * *
Artesia and the countryside around it would soon become known as one of the centers of the American dairy industry. This business in Artesia attracted a diverse group of farmers and agricultural workers. At Artesia Grammar School, Pat and her friends mixed easily with children of Portuguese, Dutch, Mexican, and Japanese backgrounds. There was a marked lack of segregation within area schools at this time. According to Pat’s childhood friend Myrtle, “Everybody mixed together.” Growing up in such an international community may have contributed to Pat’s later ease with global travel and her lifelong fascination with cultures different from her own.
Pat, her brothers, and the Raine children all walked to school, since there were no school buses in those days out in the country. Only if it was raining hard would area parents drive the children. The school was a substantial red-brick building located across from the Methodist church in town on Pioneer Boulevard. Each grade had its own large classroom. Pat was a diligent student. She was mature and motivated, skipping two grades in elementary school. She and her brothers Bill and Tom would all graduate in the same class, despite their age differences.
Life on the farm could be hard. Money was often scarce, and much was expected of the three Ryan children at home. Pat learned early on to keep her chin up, not to complain, and not to expect too much from life. However, there were pleasures to be had both outdoors in the beautiful Southern California sunshine and inside reading books or dreaming up plays to perform for the neighborhood. The young girl did have dreams beyond the farm, and a spark within her to make things happen and to see a bigger world. As her friend Myrtle recognized early on: “She’s got that push in there that she’s always had, ever since she was a little child. I mean she really strives for something and goes out and gets it.”
2 SOMETHING MORE THAN JUST AN ORDINARY COUNTRY GIRL
Not every childhood is perfect. Pat’s was occasionally marred by her father’s drinking binges. Usually an attentive and caring father, every once in a while Will would return from a night out, smelling of alcohol and in a combative mood. Pat saw Kate reprimand her husband in front of the children, leading to scenes that Pat was determined to avoid in her own life. “I detest temper. I detest scenes. I just can’t be that way. I saw it with my father,” she would tell daughter Julie later in her life. Simply put, Pat was not pliant or subservient. She always had her own dreams and goals in mind. Instead of being defiant or brash to get what she wanted, Pat’s style was traditional, conservative. She learned early on to fly under the radar.
Far more upsetting than these occasional fights between her parents was her mother’s serious illness, which began toward the end of the 1925 school year. Kate was often in pain and bedridden when Pat came home from school. Because Kate was a Christian Scientist and did not believe in medical intervention, she put off seeing a doctor until her illness had become untreatable. She died on January 18, 1926, from a combination of Bright’s disease and liver cancer. Her daughter was only thirteen and a freshman at Excelsior Union High School in Artesia.
Pat’s high school friends, including Marcia Elliott Wray, recalled her tightly controlled calm after her mother’s funeral. “It was the first time any of us had lost a parent. We were all kind of nervous, I remember, and we were wondering how to treat her when she came back to school.… I remember after the service was over at the little funeral parlor, a group of us girls, maybe four or five, were standing out there wondering what to say to Pat when she came out. She came out smiling and walked directly to us and she said, ‘Didn’t she look beautiful?’” The bright face the young teenager put on for others and her strenuous effort to keep up appearances surely masked her deep grief. It was an early sign of how she would act when she was in the public eye and life was rocky.
Though Pat did participate in events at the Christian Science and Methodist churches near her growing up, she was not considered particularly religious by her peers. Pat may have learned from her early personal experience with her mother that praying for miracles rarely brought results. As Richard Nixon’s famous cousin Jessamyn West, the novelist, later noted of Pat, her fortitude did not surface thanks to religious convictions or upbringing. “It wasn’t Christian Science, of any formal kind … rather a frontier hardihood.… Perhaps it was an early acquaintance with sickness and death. The way Ernest Hemingway put it was: ‘Live and get your job done.’”
* * *
Pat took on a new persona after her mother died. She rarely went by Thelma anymore, preferring to be known by the nickname Buddy. She was plumper at this point than she would be later in her life, weighing about 132 pounds in high school at five feet five and a half inches tall. She was becoming a beautiful young woman with a “very pretty complexion, sort of rosy.”
As was typical of this era, household management was seen as “woman’s work” and fell almost entirely on Pat when her mother passed away. Her father and brothers counted on her to cook, clean, and do the laundry while still juggling her farm chores with schoolwork and other activities. Pat was now faced with an exhausting daily schedule at a critical developmental juncture. Pat’s childhood ended prematurely. Instead, she became a second mother, not only to her brothers but also perhaps to her father as well.
Consequently, Pat was sometimes perceived by her Excelsior Union High School classmates as aloof. “We thought she was pretty stand-offish,” her classmate Marcia Elliott Wray recalled, “but now I see it entirely differently. I think she was a lonely child who needed friendship.… I suppose we thought that she thought she was better than us.… And now I know it wasn’t true at all. It was just our reaction to her aloofness, perhaps pride, because her family was having trouble.” The young woman did not date much, though she did enjoy going to dances as part of a group, as many in her crowd tended to do. But she wasn’t a carefree teenager; she was now a young adult with grown-up duties to fulfill.
Pat had a somewhat distant relationship with her half-sister, Neva, who was seven years her senior. Neva always felt second-best to her brother Matthew, who had received the bulk of their Bender grandparents’ attention and resources, probably due to being male and somewhat of a replacement for their deceased son, Kate’s first husband. When Kate was alive, she realized this and felt guilty she could not provide the extra items her older daughter craved.
Neva and Pat were both strikingly pretty and resembled each other with their flawless complexions. Neva acted more like an aunt than a sister to Pat, Bill, and Tom. She had left the Ryan residence in Artesia in 1924 after graduation from high school. Her grandparents had bequeathed her a small inheritance, which allowed her to attend Fullerton Junior College and keep her own apartment in Los Angeles.
After Kate died, Neva returned to Artesia occasionally on the weekends. However, she was training to be a nurse, despite (or perhaps because of) her mother’s disdain for traditional medicine. Neva would often take a streetcar from L.A. to Artesia to visit. Due to the age difference between Neva and Matthew and their half siblings, they were not particularly close to the Ryan children. It was thirteen-year-old Pat, not twenty-year-old Neva, who took charge of the daily management of the household.
* * *
On June 7, 1929, Pat, Tom, and Bill graduated from high school together, as noted earlier. “Among the top students in her class, Pat was advanced two grades and eventually graduated the same year as her brother Tom and the eldest, Bill, who had been held back a year.” Although all three Ryan children were offered college scholarships, there still wasn’t enough money for all of them to attend college at the same time. Tom would go first; it was hoped that the other two children would follow him and continue their education.
Their father, Will, was slowly dying from tuberculosis. Bill took over the farm, while Pat would be assigned the toughest task of all: being a nurse to her dying father. Tom promised her he would help her get the college education she craved down the road when he finished college and could help her financially.
Will’s illness was only the beginning of more adversity for the Ryans. In October 1929, the American stock market crashed, and the Great Depression began. The Roaring Twenties with their postwar excess gave way to Dorothea Lange’s photos of the desperate poor and the Dust Bowl. A decade of hardship would follow, affecting almost all who lived through this time, including Pat and her family. “The unemployment rate climbed from 9 percent in 1930 to 16 percent in 1931, to 23 percent in 1932, by which time nearly twelve million Americans—a number equal to the entire population of the state of New York—were out of work.… [I]n many homes income fell to zero. One in four Americans suffered for want of food.”
Between 1929 and 1932, one in five American banks failed. Even so, after her high school graduation, Pat began working for Artesia First National Bank, a small establishment on the corner of 187th Street and Pioneer Boulevard. Pat took the job to help pay for her father’s hospitalization and medical treatment. Her job was to post the checks each day and to help with the bookkeeping. The staff was small, mostly female, and hardworking; friendly Pat fit in well with the group.
Pat’s friend Blanche Potter Holmes had an older sister, Frances, who worked at the bank with Pat. One day both Pat and Frances were working behind the teller window. Blanche recalled, “A young man came to the window. He had a gun in his hand; a note, and he demanded all of the cash. Frances said that Pat was standing by her and they just froze on the spot and gave him the money.… Later he was found and they had to go to court.” The young women’s testimony helped convict the thief. Their calmness and good memory for the robber’s physical features saved the day. Pat didn’t ever allow herself to fall to pieces. And she would never be a damsel in distress. She couldn’t afford such luxuries.
* * *
On May 5, 1930, Will Ryan died of tuberculosis at the age of sixty-four. Now Pat, Bill, and Tom were orphans and had only each other to depend on; they drew together even more tightly than before. It was the three Ryan siblings against the world. Sorrowful though she was about her father’s death, at least now Pat was relieved of the burden of nursing him. Finally she could begin to work toward her dream of a college education.
Pat enrolled under the name Patricia Ryan at Fullerton Junior College in fall 1931 while still working at the bank. The name Thelma and the nicknames Buddy and Babe were left home in Artesia. Now the ambitious young woman went only by Patricia or Pat. Pat would later tell her daughters that the choice of a new name was a tribute to her father. The young woman still had to keep her part-time job to fund her first foray into college life. “Daily at 6 a.m. she dusted, swept, and washed the floors and then returned home in time for her carpool ride to college.”
This collegiate Cinderella would return in the afternoons to work as a teller and bookkeeper for the bank. Due to her grueling schedule, Pat was not able to enter fully into the social life at Fullerton College that year. Still, she managed to snag the lead role in the school play Broken Dishes, a part played by Bette Davis onstage in New York.
Mabel Myers, one of Pat’s professors, remembered her as a good, responsible student, friendly but without many close friends. She noted Pat’s good taste in clothes and her ambition to move up in the world. To Myers, it appeared that Pat was “a very personable, attractive girl who knew where she was going and who was intent on getting there because of what it would do for the rest of her family.” A college degree not only would unlock better jobs for the young woman but also would give her the social polish she needed to move up in the world. Perhaps more important, Pat loved to learn and wanted to keep learning; otherwise she could not or would not have been able to shoulder such a daunting schedule.
However, Pat did not return to college in the fall of 1932. Instead, she had a chance to see the East Coast and to leave California for the first time since her move there from Nevada. Friends of her aunt Annie (Will’s sister) in Connecticut needed someone to drive them from California, where they spent several months a year, back east. The elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Beers, interviewed Pat and immediately offered her the job. It was her turn to explore the wider world.
As Pat would soon learn, adventures often involved some adversity. At barely twenty, Pat took charge of the Beerses’ ancient boatlike Packard automobile. She changed flat tires, navigated dirt roads through inclement weather, and dealt with failing brakes and broiling temperatures. When the car almost lurched down a steep hill, Pat kept a cool head and was able to steer masterfully, bringing the automobile to a safe stop. Grace under pressure was fast becoming Pat’s specialty. But the dangerous road conditions were not what made Pat shudder later in life when she recalled the grueling journey. In 1971, she recounted that Mr. Beers “sat beside me up front. And for three thousand miles he made a clicking sound with his teeth. Flat tires, mud, rain—I could take them all, but that day-long sound of clicking stays with me yet.”
Once Pat safely delivered the couple to Ridgefield, she was promised a bus ticket home as payment. However, after spending time with her aunt Annie and her aunt Kate in New York, she decided to remain on the East Coast. Aunt Kate was a nun, known also as Sister Thomas Anna. She worked for Seton Hospital, a Catholic-run facility specializing in the treatment of tuberculosis patients, as the head of the X-ray and pharmacy departments. When Pat was offered a secretarial job there, she was thrilled. She would spend two years of her life here, working in numerous areas of the hospital and even training as a radiology technician.
Not once did it occur to the young woman to fear TB despite her own father’s death from the disease. Tuberculosis or “consumption” had been rampant in the nineteenth century, killing one in seven of all people. Good hygiene could help prevent TB, and the United States launched massive public health campaigns to educate the public on tuberculosis prevention and treatment.
Even so, those who caught the disease were stigmatized and seen as invalids who bore—and spread—a dread disease. Perhaps due to Pat’s lengthy experience nursing her father, she didn’t view those with TB as a health risk. She saw them as people who needed attention and care. Pat often went sledding with patients, in violation of the hospital rules. “I wanted to reach out and help them.… That is what gives me the deepest pleasure in the world—helping someone.”
While working at Seton Hospital she met and dated several eligible young men, including Dr. Francis Vincent Duke, who oversaw the hospital. A handsome Irishman, the thirty-five-year-old doctor was single and available. He pursued the beautiful Pat seriously, at one point hinting at marriage, but her head was barely turned. She wanted to enjoy her freedom and her time on the East Coast without any serious romantic entanglements. Associating with nuns certainly helped the young woman keep her distance. She told her daughter Julie many years later, “I didn’t want to marry because I had been so busy all my life. I felt I had not lived yet.”
Pat also had the chance for some paid travel courtesy of Seton Hospital. One highlight of her job was being Seton’s representative at a medical conference held in New York City at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Pat playfully wrote “Some dump!” on Waldorf Astoria stationery next to an image of the iconic hotel. Thrilled to be in the big city, she attended lectures and luncheons, and even briefly met President and Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt, who attended a formal dinner at the conference.
Many of Eleanor Roosevelt’s comments in her 1933 book It’s Up to the Women could have been written about Pat herself. As historian Jill Lepore writes, Roosevelt’s book made the point that “only women could lead the nation out of the Depression … by frugality, hard work, common sense, and civic participation. The ‘really new deal for the people’ … had to do with the awakening of women.” Although later, as First Lady, Pat would not look upon Eleanor Roosevelt as one of her role models, as a young independent woman of the Depression era, Pat fit Roosevelt’s description to a T. Indeed, Pat started her voting life as a Democrat, even campaigning for presidential candidate Al Smith in high school.
Pat’s time off from work also brought excitement. Though Pat never sought attention, she couldn’t help but attract it with her slim figure, tailored but chic style, red-gold hair, and chiseled features. On a boat trip to Bear Mountain, she was noticed by a Paramount Pictures talent scout and went to the Paramount Theater in New York for tryouts. Ultimately Pat decided against pursuing this career avenue. Pat never had stars in her eyes and showed pragmatic judgment in the matter. She wrote her brother Bill “that [Hollywood] life is too tough, and unless you are featured the pay is low—one of the reasons why girls are tempted to accept presents and attentions—sheer necessity.” Even so, this wouldn’t be the last time Hollywood came calling for her.
In the spring of 1934 Tom wrote to his sister with some welcome news. He had saved enough to help her return home and help her finish college in California. Pat was thrilled, but she still worried how she and her brothers would make ends meet. Despite working for two years in New York, she had not been able to save much. Tom reassured her and suggested that the three siblings share an apartment near the University of Southern California (USC) campus. Pat happily agreed and returned home to California that August.
Pat was granted a research scholarship that fall. In exchange for working twenty hours a week for a USC psychology professor, her tuition was paid, and she also received a small amount toward living expenses. This still wasn’t enough to cover all her needs, so she took another part-time secretarial position. During her time at USC, she would work many different odd jobs. Years later, her former English professor Dr. Frank Baxter recalled how he saw her working tirelessly on campus at all hours of the night and day. “He recalled that despite her exhausting schedule, ‘she was a good student, alert and interested. She stood out from the empty-headed, overdressed little sorority girls of that era like a good piece of literature on a shelf of cheap paperbacks.’”
Still, Pat had fun. She became lifelong friends with Virginia Shugart, a young woman from Los Angeles she met in an education class. Going to sporting events, they became friendly with many of the USC athletes, who often were called by the Hollywood studios to be extras in films. Virginia later recalled that “THEY usually got first call for the special jobs. And they would say, ‘Hi Virginia, there’s a call for a movie job.’ So, we would rush down to the employment office so that we’d be first there to get the call, and we loved those particular jobs.” At $7 a day, these jobs were the best-paying ones the women could obtain.
Pat did live the life of a young woman in an exciting city that was the center of the movie industry in the United States. She had an uncredited dancing scene in the 1935 film Becky Sharp, as well as appearances in The Great Ziegfeld, Small Town Girl, and Ben Hur, but the sparkle of Hollywood faded quickly in the face of long, boring days of filming and casting couch politics. Pat was no Eve Harrington and looked around for other employment. By her junior year, Pat was working as a model and personal shopper for Bullocks, “Los Angeles’ most deliriously art deco department store for generations.” The flagship store on Wilshire Boulevard, where Pat worked and developed a sense of style that served her well once she was constantly in the public eye, opened in 1929 and would almost instantly become a beacon of fashion and glamour in an already glamorous city.
But Pat was practical and had completed education hours and a semester of teacher training at USC. Because of the many different jobs she had held both at and outside the college while she was a full-time student, Pat earned a “Special Credential” from USC that would equate today to a master’s degree. This all helped her when she applied for a teaching job through USC’s Bureau of Teacher Placement. She was soon notified that she had been chosen to teach business-related subjects, including typing, bookkeeping, stenography, and business principles, at Whittier Union High School in Whittier, California.
Pat, Tom, and Bill again graduated as a trio, this time from USC in June 1937. Tom would be working for Twentieth Century Fox movie studios in the lighting department, while Bill graduated with a master’s degree and would be teaching high school in Burbank. Like Bill, Pat began to gear up for the fall teaching semester and a move to a new town.
3 A MAGIC LITTLE CITY
After working in Hollywood film and at Bullocks in high-end clothing sales, Pat must have found Whittier a bit dull initially. Whittier was first and foremost a Quaker town, founded in 1897 by Aquila Pickering, a Quaker elder from Chicago.
Pickering’s Land and Water Company swooped in and bought up former ranch land, selling lots to establish a “Quaker Colony.” Twenty acres of land were set aside for a future college, first named Whittier Academy, now known as Whittier College. Whittier was incorporated in 1898, and Whittier Academy was established in 1891.
The citrus, walnut, and oil industries drove Whittier’s early economy along with the arrival of the Southern Pacific, Pacific Electric, and Santa Fe Railroads. Thanks in large part to the railroads, the new town flourished and acquired the local nickname “the magic little city.” By the time Pat arrived in Whittier in the fall of 1937, the population had grown from eight hundred at its founding to close to sixteen thousand. Resident Elizabeth Cloes described the small town as a charming, close-knit community: “Whittier was very much like a little village; a friendly Quaker village. You would walk downtown, and, in every block, you would meet two or three people you knew.”
Phil Studebaker, who attended Whittier Union High School during Pat’s time there, recalled: “Whittier was a real, small quiet town.… Kids all thought they rolled up the sidewalks at nine o’clock.” The Quaker influence was strong. Lura Waldrip, a student of Pat’s at Whittier High, noted the strict religious rules of the town: “For many, many years there were absolutely no bars within the city limits of Whittier. They were forbidden! And on Sunday, the streetcar did not run to the center of town.” Theaters also were not permitted inside the city limits. Many people still used horses and buggies as transportation to and from Sunday church services. Dancing remained forbidden at the high school when Pat began her teaching career there; dances were held instead at the local women’s club.
Pat must have had moments where she regretted making the jump from sophisticated big-city life in L.A. to this old-fashioned Quaker enclave. She would later famously say that the only reason she took the job was because she was destined to meet Dick Nixon there in his hometown.
Pat first rented a room from Raymond Collins and his wife, but it would not be long before she would get to know a fellow teacher who would become her roommate and fast friend. Pat and Margaret O’Grady met at Whittier High in the fall semester of 1937. The country was nearing the end of the Great Depression, but hiring was still sluggish. Both young women felt lucky to obtain teaching work. Margaret taught history, while Pat taught business subjects. The two women soon decided to lease a bungalow apartment in the McNees Park area, across from a noisy bowling alley. They shared the rent, the cooking, and the cleaning.
Margaret recalled Pat as a highly organized hard worker who required little sleep. Pat was a natural disciplinarian and wasn’t intimidated by teaching. In fact, she excelled at it. One of Pat’s former students, Betty Jean Kenworthy, remembered her in the classroom: “She was very businesslike. There was no nonsense about the things she felt we were there to learn, and her purpose was to teach us, but she was very enthusiastic about her subject and the possibilities of jobs, and so forth, if you mastered these business skills.… She ALWAYS had this beautiful, pleasant smile … and she has so much poise, because she always seemed to be very well in control of any situation. She could have done, really, most anything that she wanted to do.”
Mildred Eason Stouffer, Pat’s typing student and the daughter-in-law of the district superintendent who hired Pat, also noted Pat’s steely ability to control naughty teenage boys. “She had to be a strict disciplinarian in class because of the boys and had good control over the class always.” She seemed to have a particular rapport with many of the girls in her classes, however.
Her connection to young people was a talent, a gift she had all her life. Gerry Anderson, one of Pat’s fellow teachers at Whittier, immediately noticed this trait in Pat. “All the young people enjoyed her because she enjoyed working with them so that she was a most successful teacher. The students would tell me that she encouraged and inspired them to work hard to do more than they thought they could.”
Pat’s attractive face and figure were noted by her male students. Future ambassador to Japan Robert Blake, also a typing student of Pat’s at Whittier High, recalled: “Miss Ryan was quite a dish, a sweater girl, with beautiful auburn hair.”
Just as Pat’s friend Blanche had noted in Artesia, Pat continued to love clothes and fashion—only now she had a little pocket money to spend. Margaret noted: “We were both interested in clothes. We would go shopping together on Saturdays and buy new clothes for school.… We thought we had lots of money. It was $100 a month.”
Despite her popularity with the teachers and students in Whittier during the week, Pat scrupulously guarded both her weekends off and her privacy. Every Friday, she would head out of town to stay with her half sister, Neva, now married to Mark Renter and living in Los Angeles. L.A. was where Pat socialized and dated, not in the small town of Whittier, which was too full of prying eyes. Pat later told daughter Julie Eisenhower: “‘I never spent a weekend in Whittier the entire time I taught there.’ She seemed proud to have thwarted those who tried to scrutinize her private life.”
Pat had a job, money, friends … and boyfriends. Her life was completely her own, with the freedom to do and act just as she pleased. Her personal life was a mystery to most in the Whittier community, as she was a reserved and shy person. Carol Gordon, who knew Pat from her early days in Whittier, wrote: “She didn’t ever talk about herself at all. She was always very calm and an inward sort of person.” A stable, controlled, and independent existence was what Pat preferred. But this way of life was not destined to last much longer for her.
* * *
After the holidays, the spring semester at the high school began. In addition to her daytime classroom duties, Pat also taught an evening shorthand class. Her former student Elizabeth Cloes would be the one to change her teacher’s life. Cloes was now an elementary school teacher at Lowell Joint Elementary School and a friend of a local lawyer named Dick Nixon, who was from a prominent Whittier family. Cloes had gone to school with Dick’s younger brother Eddie, and she was also a fan of Dick’s mother, Hannah Nixon, and her famous fruit pies, which she sold at the Nixon family’s grocery store in Whittier.
Cloes was active in a local theater group, the Whittier Community Players, and in the winter of 1938 had signed on as the lead actress in a production of George Kaufman and Alexander Woolcott’s play The Dark Tower. A small part for a pretty girl remained uncast, and Cloes immediately thought of her beautiful young teacher Pat Ryan for the role; she convinced Pat to try out. She recalled, “Pat was a very attractive person. Her eyes are always so impressive because they’re dark and flashing. She’s always been very, very slender, with rather high cheekbones, lovely hair, and a quiet vivaciousness about her.”
After dinner together at the Hoover Hotel, where Cloes resided, the two young women went over to play rehearsal at St. Matthias Church. The church allowed the Whittier Community Players use of its Sunday school space for their rehearsals. Grant Garman, who owned the Poinsettia, a popular local restaurant on Philadelphia Street, had a role in The Dark Tower. Garman knew Pat through his wife, Phyllis, and also had known Dick for many years. He recalled that evening: “Pat was there, and Dick came in, and it was like just knowing two people. ‘Dick Nixon I’d like to present Pat Ryan,’ and then we started going about our work.’”
Garman noticed immediately how smitten Dick was with Pat. She was “a striking and beautiful girl, pleasant and animated. Dick, I think, just took one look at her, at the time she came for the reading of the show and that was it.” When Pat and Elizabeth went home that evening, Dick gave them a ride in his Model A Ford. Years later, Elizabeth still remembered: “I sat in the middle; Pat sat on the outside. And he said to her, ‘I’d like to have a date with you.’ She said, ‘Oh, I’m too busy.’ So, he laughed and drove us home.” The second and third days, Nixon again brought the young women home. Elizabeth told Pat, “‘You sit next to him. He doesn’t want to sit next to me.’ She said, ‘I don’t want to sit next to him.’ So, I was again in the middle, and he leaned across me and said to her, ‘When are you going to give me that date?’ She laughed. He said, ‘Don’t laugh. Someday I’m going to marry you.’ He pointed his finger at her, and then she did laugh!” Years later, Virginia Shugart clearly recalled Pat’s remark to her that evening: “I met this guy tonight who says he is going to marry me.” While bewildered by Dick’s forthright approach, Pat was intrigued. Who was this persistent young man, and where did he get such confidence?
Richard Milhous Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California, on January 9, 1913. Dick’s mother, Hannah, came from a prominent Whittier family, the Quaker Milhous clan. She arrived in Whittier at thirteen in 1897 and married another midwesterner, Frank Nixon, from Columbus, Ohio, in 1908.
At its founding, Yorba Linda was a dusty, isolated dot on the map. It was in the middle of nowhere, a barren piece of land where Frank battled the earth to raise citrus. Dick’s cousin Jessamyn West recalled, “Frank was a tempestuous man and filled with anger.”
Indeed, Richard’s later “description of his father Frank Nixon’s hot temper reminded Pat sharply of her father Will.” In contrast, Hannah had a cool reserved nature. While she clearly adored her children, she was not emotional or outwardly demonstrative toward them. Dick later recalled, “In her whole life, I never heard her say to me or to anyone else, ‘I love you.’” The couple soon had four sons: Harold arrived in 1909, Richard in 1913, Francis Donald in 1914, and Arthur in 1918 (the fifth, Ed, would not arrive until 1930). Hannah deliberately named Harold, Richard, and Arthur after medieval English monarchs. Richard was named specifically for Richard I, often known as “Richard the Lionheart,” who personified “the epitome of military chivalry as far as Hannah was concerned.” By placing fictional crowns on their heads, the stern Hannah also placed the weight of expectation on her young boys. Richard seemed particularly sensitive to her parental pressure. He tended to force himself to perform well in all arenas, even in those he had little talent for.
Frank’s farming venture eventually failed in the arid soil of Yorba Linda. In 1922, he moved his young family back to Whittier, closer to Hannah’s relatives and to three of his own siblings. He soon opened a filling station with an attached grocery on the outskirts of town. The Nixon boys worked long hours at the gas station even as children—a common practice at that time. The family eventually moved firmly into lower-middle-class prosperity.
Young Dick’s worldview was shaped by his Quaker background and deep faith. One aspect was that “women were recognized by Quakers equally with men.” The religion also allowed women preachers. The Milhous family was replete with women who were preachers, teachers, and heads of Sunday schools. As Nixon cousin Jessamyn West laughingly put it, “So for QUAKER women—Women’s Lib—we’ve had it! Our men were fetching our slippers long ago!”
Dick graduated from Whittier High in June 1930 as “Outstanding Male Student” of his senior class. He had offers from both Harvard and Yale, but with brother Harold ill with tuberculosis and medical expenses mounting, he felt bound to stay home and help his parents with their business. He continued to work at their grocery store and enrolled in local Whittier College. Dick graduated second in his college class, earning a scholarship to Duke Law School. After completing his law degree he returned to Whittier to a job at Wingert & Bewley. Then, one winter evening, his life took a different turn.
For some reason, the young man was drawn to the theater tryouts that winter evening as an escape from the reality of the daily grind at the law firm. Whatever led him into St. Matthias Church that night, Dick’s life was about to brighten up significantly.
Dick took the role of Barry Jones in the play, while Pat took the part of Daphne Martin. The two were thrown together for five weeks of constant rehearsals and got to know each other quickly. On February 17, The Dark Tower had its debut performance at the Woman’s Club House. After the play, Dick brought Pat by to meet his parents. Clearly Dick was knocked out by Pat’s vivacious personality, her looks, and her poise.
Pat liked this guy, but she was not completely smitten. This might have had more to do with circumstances than with Dick himself. She had her freedom and her independence. She had been pursued before seriously in New York by a doctor but had parried his advances. She had no one now she had to take care of besides herself. Why would she give up what it had taken her so long to achieve? Her new suitor was going to have to work hard to convince her that relinquishing such hard-won independence was worth it.
Copyright © 2024 by Heath Hardage Lee.
