ABSTRACT
Although christened Thelma Catherine, the wife of the thirty-seventh president of the United States would always be known as “Patricia,” or just “Pat,” Nixon. Born late in the night on March 16, 1912, in a mining tent in Ely, Nevada, Thelma Catherine Ryan was nicknamed “Pat” by her father, William Ryan, when he returned home from his work as a silver miner. His calling her his “St. Patrick's Babe in the Morn” was a tribute to his heritage as the son of Irish immigrant parents. Her mother, Kate Halberstadt Bender Ryan, a native of southern Germany who was widowed with two children, married Ryan after she immigrated to the United States. Patricia was thus the only twentieth-century president's wife to be a first-generation American. The Ryan family, including two sons, Tom and Bill, moved to a ten-acre truck farm in the small southern-California town of Artesia, outside of Los Angeles, later renamed Cerritos. “It was very primitive,” Patricia later said:
It was a hard life .... I didn't know what it was like not to work hard. I worked right along with my brothers in the fields, really, which was lots of fun. We picked potatoes; we picked tomatoes, we picked peppers and cauliflowers. . . . When I got older I drove the team of horses . . . .
