Pat Nixon and the Meaning of her St. Patrick’s Day Birthday
By Carl Sferrazza Anthony
On March 17, 1970, on the second St. Patrick’s Day of the Nixon presidency, both Dick and Pat Nixon were “wearing the green” in the White House to welcome the Irish Ambassador to the United States, William Warnock, and his family in the Oval Office for a brief official ceremony, during which the Ambassador presented the Nixons with a Waterford crystal decanter of shamrocks.
This brief formality was a tradition dating back at least as far as the Truman presidency — but this year, it echoed the uniquely blended nature of St. Patrick’s Day and Nixon family tradition, as it was highly personal.
The First Lady rarely joined in formal West Wing ceremonies — but this one was different.
As many Americans at the time knew, First Lady Pat Nixon was born on March 16, 1912,; to her father, that was close enough to celebrate on St. Patrick’s Day. The holy day of Ireland’s Roman Catholic patron saint was first celebrated by Irish immigrants to the United States as early as 1600 in St. Augustine, Florida.
By the early 1900s, celebrating St. Patrick’s Day had become an American tradition.
What the public never fully realized about Pat Nixon, however, was that St. Patrick’s Day was more than just her birthday and a holiday: it was her day to remember Will Ryan, her father, with whom she had strongly bonded.
With her parents and two older brothers, she planted, nurtured and harvested vegetables on a small produce farm they owned in what was then called Artesia — now Cerritos — just a dozen miles South of downtown Los Angeles.
The Ryans were migrants to the Pacific Coast state. One of thirteen children, William Martin Ryan was born in Connecticut on January 6, 1866. He found work as a sailor before becoming a gold and copper miner in Ely, Nevada. There, when his last child was born, Will Ryan’s first thoughts were not about the baby’s gender but the fact that she had been born on the day before St. Patrick’s Day. He declared her as his very own “St. Patrick’s babe in the ‘morn!” He developed a devotion to the little girl who was registered on her birth certificate as Thelma Catherine.
On January 18, 1926, Will Ryan’s wife Kate Halberstadt, a German immigrant, died of liver cancer, leaving Will a widower and his little girl without her mother at the young age of 13. Along with her farm work, Thelma now assumed the entire responsibility for the household’s cleaning and maintenance, and preparing meals not just for her father and brothers, but for the farm hands who were hired seasonally. She developed a strong determination to rise above her existence of struggle through education, which drove her, diligently, to achieve a superior academic record. She maintained this life of work for four long years.
In 1929, her father developed the terminal lung illness that beset tens of thousands of Americans proficient in manual work. Thelma was finishing her junior year of high school, and was now tasked with nursing her father and paying his medical bills.
She took a job as both a janitor and teller at the Artesia First National Bank, rising early to clean the dirt and dung brought into the bank on the heels of local farmers, then rushing off to school for classes, then returning to the bank to do bookkeeping and to act as a teller. In the evenings, she finally went home to care for her father and do the housechores.
Will Ryan died in May of 1930 during the worst depths of the Great Depression. His daughter, who had only just turned 18 years old, may have been a legal adult — but she was an orphan. Without giving way to desperation, she fought hard to make a life of her own. Not only did she keep her family of two brothers together in the house, but she worked to help pay their college tuitions, while focusing intently on her own education.
At this time, the most fundamental element of Miss Ryan’s identity forever changed — and by her own determination. After her father’s death, she changed her name to Pat, a quiet but significant tribute to the father she loved and lost so early. And, if Will Ryan was anything, she made clear in only one of two explicit public references to him, “he was one hundred percent Irish!”
Pat Nixon was the first first-generation First Lady in many years, as her mother was a German immigrant. Her mother carried with her the language and customs of her German homeland, but the abuse endured by German immigrants during World War I forced her to keep her origins a secret, fearing for the wellbeing of her children. Pat Ryan seemed to have learned about her heritage from the “old country” from her father, and later provided one clue: after college, working as a teacher while dating young lawyer Richard Nixon, Pat Ryan wrote letters on stationary with the Irish insignia of a shamrock.
The blending of her mother’s German traditions –those that she shared with her family — with those that she absorbed from her father, may well have helped in developing her own distinct identity as a first-generation American who, like an increasing number of citizens, counted multiple ethnicities in their background.
So, for Pat Nixon, St. Patrick’s Day was a day to remember her father, no matter how long it had been since he left her.
And once they made 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue home, Richard Nixon saw to it that the family’s first White House celebration was in honor of his “Irish beauty.”
On St. Patrick’s Day in 1969, wearing an artificial shamrock sprig in his jacket button, the new President accepted the traditional Waterford crystal vase of shamrocks from the Irish Ambassador. Later that evening, he surprised the woman who he called his “wild Irish gypsy,” escorting her into a room of longtime friends and political supporters with their families, and many other special friends.
The President spared no detail in organizing her surprise birthday party, as he knew the special significance of this day to her. Often joking that he was only “half-Irish” far back in his ancestry, Richard Nixon proudly spoke of his wife’s ancestral identity as an attribute to emulate. Even in his famed 1952 “Checkers Speech,” he referred to her, saying, “Her name is Patricia Ryan and she was born on St. Patrick’s Day — and you know the Irish never quit!”
Certainly, the most Irish of St. Patrick’s Day events hosted in the Nixon White House took place in 1971. In an interview several days before, the President mused that his wife’s perfect birthday would include a “walk on the beach… with her hair flying… and no photographers.” Instead, however, she took in a performance of native Irish dancing and music, which she had seen and heard just five months earlier during a luncheon in Ashford Castle while making a sentimental trip to Ireland.
The Nixons made a highly public appearance for St. Patrick’s Day in 1973. The President donned a satin green bowtie with his tuxedo, while the First Lady appeared in a flowing, low-cut green chiffon gown with an emerald green waist sash and bow. As part of her unique series showcasing uniquely American forms of the performing arts, one of the Nixon “Evenings at the White House” programs, the Nixons held a concert on St. Patrick’s Day in 1973, celebrating bluegrass and country-western music.
Composer and singer Merle Haggard was that night’s headliner, and caught the First Lady by surprise by reading an original poem that he had written for her on her birthday. It was simple but it contained a poignant reference to the mother she had loved and lost all those years ago:
“Today is somebody’s birthday
Some mother’s child was born
Some will remember some will forget
And some will be tooting their horn
The older you are the more it means
’Cause the more you have to recall…”
In 1974, on her last St. Patrick’s Day-birthday in the White House, the First Lady was aboard an Air Force jet, returning from her solo visit to several South American nations. Despite the mounting tensions of the Watergate scandal, members of the national press corps organized a surprise party for Pat Nixon, with a giant handmade card that affectionatey depicted her in a Carmen Miranda fruit headpiece, along with champagne and birthday cake. Upon landing in Nashville, Tennessee, she joined the President on stage at the Grand Ole Opry, and he roused the audience to sing “Happy Birthday” to her, while he played the song on the piano.
On October 4, 1972, the First Lady was awarded the American Irish Historical Society’s gold medal, during its 75th annual dinner, for her “humanitarianism and service to her country.”
Before an audience of some 900 guests at New York’s Waldorf Astoria, she took to the podium and delivered rare remarks about her Irish heritage: “As the granddaughter of Irish immigrants who came to this country about the time of the Civil War, I am very honored to receive this award… All of us know what the Irish have done for this country and I want to join in applauding them.” And, in one of the only known instances in which she publicly referenced her parents, she proudly remembered her father was “one hundred percent Irish!” Her speech brought down the house.
Past recipients included educators, poets, members of the bench and the clery — but never a presidential spouse. In an era when the women’s movement was seeing gender equality take hold in business and culture, New York’s Lieutenant-Governor Malcolm Wilson declared that awarding “this gracious woman of Irish lineage” truly brought this new “recognition into balance.” Among the 35 recipients of the award, the First Lady was only the second woman to receive it, the first since New York Times editorial board member Anne O’Hare McCormick received it in 1949.
It was, said Wilson, “a mark of gratitude for the honor which its recipient brings to her Irish lineage… good wife to her husband, good mother to her children and a magnificent example to this country and to the world…”
That same date, just two years earlier, while joining the President on a multi-nation foreign trip, Mrs. Nixon made a separate visit to the village of Ballinrobe, Ireland to explore the stone cottage where her grandfather Patrick Sarsfield Ryan was born, and from which he left to immigrate to the United States; it was still owned by her second cousins.
Only briefly, in answering a reporter, did she make public reference to tender, private memories.
She revealed that Will Ryan “longed to come back to such warm‐hearted people” in Ireland, recalling her grandfather’s reminiscences of Ireland told to her by her father, about “the beautiful country, sitting by the fireside, the good smell of baking, the fun they had playing games and running through the hills.”
Grandfather Patrick Ryan never met his granddaughter, dying in Connecticut in 1915 when she was only three years old, just a year after Will Ryan relocated his family from Nevada to California.
Speaking about these “tales my father used to tell me,” she only disclosed that he was prevented from fulfilling his dream because “the depression came in America and he never made it.”
Of course, in 1929, while he was telling her these stories and watching his hope of seeing Ireland fade, he was being cared for by his daughter through the terminal illness that took him just months later.
“Once an Irishman, always an Irishman,” the First Lady firmly concluded; “They always hoped to come back.”
Pat Nixon made that sentimental trip as much for Will Ryan, as for herself.
