Mrs. Richard Nixon

MRS. RICHARD NIXON Patricia Nixon, the wife of the 37th President of the United States, was born on March 16, 1912, in Ely, Nevada. Her mother, Kate Halberstadt Ryan, named her daughter Thelma Catherine Patricia. Her father, William Ryan, coming home past midnight from his work in the mines, learned of her birth and called her his "St. Patrick's babe in the morn." " She was to be "Pat" to him always. Mrs. Ryan, born in Essen County, near Frankfurt, Germany, had come to the United States as a child of ten to visit an uncle who had no family. She fell in love with America and never returned to Germany. Kate Halberstadt Bender was a widow with two children when she married William Ryan in 1909. Mrs. Nixon was the youngest of the three children born to them. Her brothers, William and Thomas Ryan, remain residents of California. Before Mrs. Nixon was a year old, Kate Ryan, whose first husband had been killed in a mining accident, persuaded William Ryan to give up mining. The family then moved from Nevada to California, settling on a small farm in Artesia, 20 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Today, the site of this home in Cerritos is the Pat Nixon Park, which includes four acres of land and the house in which Mrs. Nixon lived from 1914 to 1930. The house is currently being converted into a museum and center where local youth groups will be able to meet. The future First Lady of the United States had a childhood with no luxuries except that of a warm and loving family. But this was shattered when her mother died in 1925. At the age of 13, Mrs. Nixon took over the household duties for her father and her brothers. Two years later, when she was attending Excelsior High School, her father became seriously ill and she cared for him, as she had her mother, until his death in 1930. She was then 18, a high school graduate and completely on her own. Her first ambition was a college education. She enrolled in the Fullerton (California) Junior College and earned her expenses by working part time in a local bank. She was able to fulfill her second ambition to travel in 1931, when elderly friends of her family asked her to drive them to the East Coast. She drove them to New York where she stayed for two years working in a hospital, first as a secretary, and later, after a Columbia University summer course in radiology, as an X-ray technician. In 1934, she returned to California to enroll at the University of Southern California. During her college years, she worked as many as 40 hours a week, both on and off campus, while majoring in merchandising. In 1937,