YORBA LINDA, CALIF. - For five years, he was known as the leader of the Free World.
But for the first several years of his life, Richard Milhous Nixon had a more modest title: farm boy.
Wednesday will mark the date, 100 years ago, of a winter day so cold that Hannah Nixon was advised it would be better to bear her fifth son at home than risk traveling to a hospital. That was the day the man who would become the 37th president of the United States was born in a small, kit-constructed home surrounded by citrus trees.
The small home is now one of the most popular exhibits at the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum here, but it was Nixon's home for just a few scant years before failed crops forced his family to Whittier.
He remembered his roots
Still, even as he rose through the highest ranks of American government, Nixon remembered his roots. Referring to his parents in his 1968 Republican National Convention acceptance speech, Nixon described his father as a man "who had to go to work before he finished the sixth grade, sacrificed everything he had so that his sons could go to college."
"People who knew my father, they knew throughout his life he was a very forward-looking person," said Richard Nixon's older daughter, Tricia Nixon Cox. "But his childhood in Orange County meant very much to him. He grew up in a very close-knit and loving family."
Nixon was a staunch anti-Communist and a fierce debater with a love of foreign lands. Some of his first travels were from his home in Whittier to the farmers markets in downtown Los Angeles.