(2 of 7)
Young Dick was a bright student. He made his debating debut in the seventh grade on a boys' team upholding, against the girls, the affirmative of "Resolved, that insects are more beneficial than harmful." In characteristic fashion (he still does his own painstaking research on legislation and speeches), young Nixon went to an entomologist uncle and assembled a formidable body of benign facts about the insect world. The girls' team was routed.
Nixon's mother was firm about church (three times on Sundays and once at midweek). Nixon played the piano for Sunday school, still plays occasionally to relax ("I'm'not as good as President Truman"). He worked his way through Whittier College (present enrollment: 1,200), mostly by helping out in the family store as cashier and delivery boy. Occasionally he helped his mother do the dishes. She recalls: "Richard always pulled the blinds down tight so that people wouldn't see him with his hands in a dishpan."
Mrs. Nixon repaired and pressed the clothes for the whole family, worked in the store during the day, and at night thriftily emptied the shelves of fruit that might spoil in another day and baked it into pies, which she put on sale in the morning. Occasionally she would catch shoplifters, but, instead of turning them over to the police, she would give them a little sermon, always aware that the disgrace of an arrest would hurt their families. Her son reflects that feeling. "Even when I was convinced that Hiss was a traitor," says Nixon, "I couldn't help thinking of his family and his friends, and how hard this was on them."
Law, a Wife & Washington. When Dick's older brother Harold had TB, Mrs. Nixon took him to Prescott, Ariz., and in the summers, Dick joined them, working as a barker for the wheel of fortune at the Frontier Days Rodeo. He learned the knack of drumming up customers, and his booth became the most popular in the show.
The wheel of Nixon's own fortune carried him from Whittier (he graduated second in his class) to a scholarship at Duke University's law school. He lived with three other students in a shack in a wooded patch a mile and a half from the campus.
After Duke (1937), Nixon practiced law in Whittier, and got a lot of divorce cases, to whose more explicit details he listened with acute embarrassment. He also taught Sunday school, joined the junior chamber of commerce, and acted in a Little Theater group. In Night of January 16, he played a district attorney opposite pretty Pat Ryan, a California redhead who, like Dick, had worked her way through college and was a teacher at the local high school. They were married in 1940. A month after Pearl Harbor, Nixon went to work for the OPA in Washington. Says he: "In OPA I learned respect for the thousands of hard-working Government employees and an equal contempt for most of the political appointees at the top. I saw Government overlapping and Government empire-building firsthand."