Born to Francis Nixon, a citrus farmer and grocer, and his devout Quaker wife Hannah, Richard Milhous Nixon grew up amid hardship, losing two brothers to tuberculosis. He would go on to become the 37th President of the United States, whose career spanned Cold War diplomacy, the opening of China, and the Watergate scandal that forced his resignation in 1974.
"I was born in a house my father built," Richard Nixon wrote in the opening line of his memoir, and the modest frame house in Yorba Linda, California, became a lasting emblem of the self-made story he told about himself. His father, Francis "Frank" Nixon, was a restless Ohio-born man who had worked as a streetcar motorman and at other odd jobs before trying his hand at lemon growing on a small plot in the Orange County town. His mother, Hannah Milhous Nixon, came from a devout Quaker family, and it was her maiden name that her son carried as his middle name. The Nixons would have five sons: Harold, Richard, Donald, Arthur and Edward.
The lemon grove never prospered, and the family's finances were precarious throughout Richard's boyhood. They eventually left Yorba Linda for nearby Whittier, a Quaker community, where Frank opened a gas station that grew into a family grocery store. Richard worked behind the counter, rising before dawn to buy produce in Los Angeles. Tuberculosis struck the household twice, claiming both Arthur and Harold, and the cost of Harold's long illness strained the family further. Nixon later recalled lying awake as a boy in Yorba Linda, listening to the whistle of passing trains and dreaming of the distant places they were bound for.
Those early years of scarcity, piety and grief shaped the ambitious, guarded man who would rise through Whittier College, Duke University's law school, Congress and the vice presidency to the White House. The house in Yorba Linda still stands on its original site, restored and incorporated into the grounds of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, which opened in 1990. Nixon and his wife, Pat, are buried a short walk from the house, bringing the 37th president's life to rest just steps from where it began.