Word: patting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...result, the cool, composed Pat Nixon of endless bunting-draped platforms obliterated the warm Pat Nixon who put the shy at ease and never forgot a birthday. She excelled in keeping the White House a national treasure, acquiring more fine American furnishings than any other First Lady. Thanks to her, James Monroe's special-order French bergere was returned to its rightful place in the Blue Room, and Gilbert Stuart portraits of John Quincy Adams and his wife replaced copies in the Red Room. "She wouldn't allow anybody to give her the credit," says White House curator Rex Scouten...
...quite a story. She was a child of the frontier, born in scruffy Ely, Nevada; a daughter of the Depression, helping coax a living out of four acres of Southern California soil; a wife of the '50s, on the ladder to success. Christened Thelma Catherine Ryan, she was dubbed Pat by her Irish-American father, a miner, to mark her arrival on the eve of St. Patrick's Day. Eventually she made the nickname legal, but somehow she was always more a Thelma than a Patricia, the kind of girl that in those days was called spunky. Life was marginal...
...Pat Ryan put herself through the University of Southern California, graduating cum laude. Her first job was teaching at Whittier High School, where the lively Miss Ryan was the students' favorite. At an amateur- theater try-out, she met young lawyer Richard Nixon, who proposed on the first date. "I thought he was crazy," she declared years later. He persevered for three years, and in 1940 they were married...
...Pat never wanted a life in politics. But her husband did, so she gave it her all. "I do or die," she once said, "but I never cancel out." She was such the perfect wife and mother -- pressing his pants, making dresses for daughters Tricia and Julie, doing her own housework even as the Vice President's wife -- that she was tagged "Plastic Pat." Washington sophisticates just didn't get it: that was the real Pat Nixon doing those homely family tasks, loving the life that had always been on the other side of the candy-store window. Far from...
...another after they moved to New York in 1980. Beset by emphysema and then lung cancer, she grew ever more frail. Last week, after 81 years, the life that had been a study in selflessness came to a quiet close, surrounded by the family who understood the real Pat Ryan Nixon...